I really wanted to find a pic of the “Hey Kids, it’s Easy” poster we have at the club, but this is close enough.
3rd figure, you can see the bump and extension. This is why I don’t like calling it a second pull, you are not pulling the weight up, rather “falling” under the bar into your catch position. Keep playing with it. Another good tip I got is not to keep all the weight on your heels, rather use mid-foot. This might be tough for you with your past injuries, but it’s something to think about.
ah, dinahb, i see what you mean. This oly stuff is hard with different coaches preferring / using different terminology. Different people have different ways of breaking the lifts down into their components, too, so it is a terminology cluster-fuck, basically. It is also a bit hard (I reckon) because some ways of thinking about it are useful for some lever lengths… But not so useful for others…
I’m used to thinking of each lift as being comprised of two parts (forgetting about the jerk entirely - haven’t learned this yet).
The pull - from the floor to full extension (so power-cleans / clean-pulls (which I take to be synonymous and ditto for power-snatch / snatch-pulls) and
The catch - from full extension to ‘catching’ it in the deep squat then standing the squat up (so front and overhead squats - though they don’t quite prepare you for the descent under the bar).
Controversy (and still figuring this out)…
Sometimes people break the pull down into smaller components. The ‘first pull’ is pulling the bar from the floor to someplace where it clears your knees and where you have maximal tension generated in your hamstrings (maybe sorta like the bottom of a Romanian deadlift).
At this point you can use the tension in your hamstrings together with hipdrive (the hip bump) and shrug to forcefully explode into full extension (the ‘second pull’) which generates upwards momentum on the bar.
Then you can simply drop under the bar for the catch (and kind of ‘collect yourself’ under it)… But you will actually descend faster if you forcefully push yourself down against the bar (if that makes sense - can only be done when the bar is heavy enough relative to your bodyweight).
But: I’m just learning. At least once a week I discover that I’m conceptualizing what I’m doing incorrectly so I wouldn’t be surprised if people get upset with some / most / all of what I’ve said above :-/
‘Finish the pull’ is one of the things I hear a lot. I think it is because I’m not using enough hip drive (‘hump the bar’ is sometimes a cue lol - kind of like driving your hips through properly to finish a deadlift) and also because I’m not shrugging up my traps.
Aside from today… My usual sticking points on the front squat are just before the bottom on the descent (I slow down to try and combat cheating when it feels heavy and run out of oomph and glutes and hamstrings give up). If I don’t mess up there then I have to wait around a little for my quads to kick in properly on the ascent. Still making neurological gains on the latter, I think. I don’t have the ‘catching the bounce’ thing figured as yet. So still technique and neurological gains to be had.
That was a cool vid. I saw a girl in there doing split cleans, don’t see many of those. Check out Cara Heads on youtube, she has vids squat jerking 250+ at 150bw - amazing.
[quote]PB Andy wrote:
You mentioned you do O-lifting on Masch’s page, so… here I am. You should visit the Olympic lifting forum and post in our log![/quote]
YES!!
Hey Alexus! Amazing stuff you got going on here and such an inspiration! I can’t wait to learn all about this - as of now I’m reading your logs and and googling pretty much everything. HAH! But you’re putting up some awesome vids and tons of info, so thanks for that (thanks to dianab too!).
Anyways, just wanted to say that I’m def following along - keep it up woman!
I’m excited about your log, Alexus! I’ve been meaning to learn more about oly lifting, now I guess I’ll have to so I can keep up That, and I’ll have to brush up on my kg/lb conversion so I’ll know what the heck you and Brestruction are doing…
POWERSNATCH: 20kg 1x3, 22.5kg 1x3, 25kg 1x3, 27.5kg 1x2 then miss. Should have used chalk. Double. 25kg 1x3, 22.5kg 1x3, 30kg 1x3. Fussing over the bar (sometimes the women’s bar seems to small to grip properly). Just felt fussy in general. Not pulling as straight as I’d like.
SNATCH: 20kg double, 22.5kg double, 25kg double, 27.5kg 2x1. Catch feeling a little shaky today. 25kg 3x2.
ROMANIAN DEADLIFT: 35kg 1x5, 45kg 1x5. Feeling good in my back. Still decided to switch to regular ones (which I prefer at the mo)
DEADLIFT: 55kg 1x5, 60kg 1x5, 65kg 1x5. Happy with that. Want to get it back to what it was before I hurt my back (top set of 75kg) and work towards 1.5x bodyweight.
STANDING BENT OVER BARBELL ROWS: warm up women’s bar 1x10. 25kg 1x5, 27.5kg 1x5. Feeling really easy. 30kg1x5, 32.5kg 1x5, 35kg 1x5. Good. Start at 27.5kg next time.
LAT PULL DOWN: Feeling a bit tired (above took a while today) so just used machine. Worked up to doubles at 50kg. Felt okay. Shouldn’t be too far off a chin up.
PLANKS / ACTIVATION: Done while resting throughout.
Squats tomorrow. I better not suck as bad as last time
Split clean… Tempting, oh so tempting Going to try my best to get a good squat clean, but that is what I might need to do, yeah. I found this website a while back on the history of olympic weightlifting technique and I think the idea is that most prefer to squat clean because you can get lower under the bar doing that with shoes with a heel (so don’t need to pull it as high). The lady in the vid didn’t seem to have as deep a squat as the other one - but she surely did seem to have a strong pull. I will keep working on squat cleans, but I might need to end up doing those, yeah.
I’ve been reluctant to post my log to the oly forum because I’ve only just started doing full snatches recently and my weights aren’t very good (for my front squat in particular). I get a little frustrated that other people can muscle up much heavier weights and that I’m so weak I may log over there one day…
But at the moment really loving to have some contact with some women since I really don’t see very many in the heavy weights room. Great for me to see what kinds of weights and programs people are doing. Do enjoy posting over on the olympic forum too, though, but will stick with the log here for a while, I think.
i am glad you have your thread here because i’d like to learn along with you!
man, the lifts seem so intimidating to me, they require alot of thought to keep things together:{ I hope you keep us up to speed on your progress, for my own selfish reasons
Learn those snatch and clean progressions and FOLLOW THEM! It’s not as hard as you think. It only gets hard when you have to maintain those positions during a heavy ass lift!
Work deadline needed to be extended… Lots of stress, basically. And now that it is done I need to find a job, which is basically another stress. Learned that stress really can affect training even if other things are in order (though hard to sleep, admittedly). Had a few light days, and days where I needed to bail part way through. Some good training too, though. Some stuff:
Got access to a resistance band so I can do 5x5 chin ups, though hard work. I’m not convinced I’m strong enough to contract my lats hard at the top - but I’ll see how I go with these for a while in my quest to do a chin-up. Sick to death of the pull-down machine at any rate.
Moved back to 5x5 front squats. I was doing triples, doubles, and singles in order to try and bring my front squat up to match my powerclean but the movement wasn’t feeling as smooth and I got really crabby when I couldn’t match my last training weights. Think I was being a bit lazy, too, in moving away from 5x5. 30kg at the moment. Will bring the middle set up to 32.5, then the three middle sets, then introduce 35 for the one middle set, then replace the outliers with 32.5… Hopefully make solid progress in this way for a while.
Can powerclean 45kg now. It wouldn’t go up for the longest time, but now it will go up for a couple singles. That is nice. Makes me feel worse about my squat, though (40kg front squat max occasionally).
Aside from that just ticking along. Need to use my legs more when deadlifting. Need to slow down a bit with snatches, I think. Really grease the movement so it is reliable rather than being too keen to put the weight up. I’ll get there…
Brought my last pack of tobacco… Pretty sure… Need to see about this job business, though. Damn life that gets in the way of training…
