Go DAWGS!

I am finally impressed with my bulldogs ability to win a big game. For the first time in many games I was impressed to see that Aaron Murray specifically decided to step up and play big boy football. Go Dawgs!
We are finishing up day three of the Las Vegas Outlaw camp. Yesterday we were working on clean and jerk and I noticed something different about this camp that I had not seen in previous camps. For one reason or another these particular coaches, athletes, and affiliate owners struggled to finish their second pull on the clean. It was not so much of a struggle in the snatch but with the excess amount of weight in the clean we saw a distinct problem in multiple athletes at the top of their second pull.
A great example is one of the CrossFit Apollo owners, Chad, who could not for the life of him finish strong and tall at a 85% clean or higher. Jared and I were watching him lift and thought there might be a disconnect between his understanding of what happened at the hips or a simple strength problem in his inability to complete the lift. We had him do some power cleans at the same weight, 235 pounds, thinking those to be his best power builder and we quickly realized that the strength was there as his power clean was beautiful. We later found out that he maxed his power clean at 285 pounds and his clean at 300. For those of you who are unaware that is a significantly higher power clean percentage to clean than normal.
What we found with Chad was that he not only had the strength to complete the movement but was actually very good at the second pull but his anxiousness to get into the bottom of the squat often times shorted his strongest movement. We commented watching Chad lift that he was incredibly fast to the bottom of squat but what we did not realize initially was that he was fast into the squat because he was most worried about getting under the bar and being able to stand up with it. He has a pretty weak front squat and so the hardest part of the clean for him is the squat. For this reason he is always anxious to get under the bar fast as he can and get standing up as soon as possible.
While there are some attributes and positives to being fast under the bar it cannot come at the cost of decreasing power output vertically. Chad is fast under the bar but he has to understand the sequencing of the lift before he pulls himself down.
Our big teaching moment for the camp was the absolute necessity of finishing the pull before starting the third pull. Being too anxious to get under the bar often will cause you to miss lifts which will cause the bar to crash on you as you do not allow for max vertical power output.