I got to explain something very simple to the group at Crossfit Unbroken today for the Outlaw Camp. They all wanted to know what I thought about bar/body contact and how much or how little the bar interacts with the hips in the power position.
I refereed to Newton’s Laws and some basic biomechanics.
Newton’s First Law States: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”
Newton’s Third Law States: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
That applies to the contact at the hips very simply in that how the bar and hips meet determines the actions that follow. If my hips are moving horizontally toward a bar moving vertically then the horizontal impact of the bar on the vertically moving bar HAS to move the bar horizontally in some fashion. Newton’s first and third laws demands this. Furthermore, the power applied by the hips to the bar is reciprocated by bar speed. This is determined by Newton’s Third Law and in combination with Newton’s First Law, any horizontal force applied to a bar by the hips will cause the bar to move horizontally with reciprocal speed based on the amount of force applied to the bar.
THEREFORE there IS NEVER any reason for the bar to make contact at the hips in such a way that the hips send the bar horizontally at all. Regardless of what you think about bar/body contact, physics demands that the hips move vertically. Likely, your body’s segment lengths will determine how violent that contact is at the hips. However, regardless of segment lengths, the hips MUST be moving vertically or the bar will always track poorly from the power position.
You simply can’t beat physics.
Developing Power & Strength through the use of the Olympic Lifts.
