One of my favorite things as a coach is when teaching cues are given to athletes who care to put those cues to work. Here in Green Bay we saw what was some pretty significant errors in the snatch on day one but after teaching many of the positions and keys for the snatch we saw a huge translation over to the clean. It was blatantly obvious that many of the coaches and affiliate owners in the room understood the carryover of the first pull, extension at the hips, and things of that nature from the snatch to the clean. We maxed out the clean and jerk after the teaching session and we saw some a much greater amount of PRs. It was amazing to see how quickly what we taught in the snatch had been put to work in the clean. They were much better at the clean than I expected after watching the snatch but many of them reminded me that much of what they learned about the snatch they tried to use in the clean and it translated to greater weight on the bar.
This makes a great point that often there is no necessity to increase strength to gain a new PR. Don’t hear that I’m not a fan of strength. Clearly strength is the key to consistently gaining weight in your lifts. However these guys had a misunderstanding of the lifts that when changed to a correct understanding immediately correlated to heavier weights. They did not have time to increase their squat or get more mobile. They simply fixed their lifts and saw immediate feedback. This works great for lifters who have errors in their lifts and we saw that this weekend.
However there’s always the lifter who was already pretty proficient and no matter how hard he tries just is not strong enough to squat the bar up. I feel for these guys as they do everything right and just are not strong enough yet to make that weight. Below is a good example of that. A awesome pull and great turnover but just not enough legs to stand up. This is the type of lifter you want to see walking into your gym because all you have to do is put him under the squat bar.
Daniel Blum fail cleann
