[quote]TheJonty wrote:
[quote]IronNation14 wrote:
TheJonty.
The lifts are seperate. I don’t mean to incorporate them into one, single lift.
The movements are similar and therefore I believe that there would be a functional cross over between the two. PM me if you’d like to have a discussion over it - I’d love to talk training.
[/quote]
The movements are similar, but the jerk is distinctly different from any version of overhead press in that the emphasis is as much on getting under the bar as it is getting the bar as high as possible (much like a squat snatch or squat clean). And personally I’ve never had much carry over from a strict overhead press or even a push press to my jerk.[/quote]
This is precisely one of the reasons that there were originally 3 olympic lifts: clean/jerk, snatch, and the press. They involve the same muscles, but the difference between slow speed strength in the press and the completely different jerk technique is huuuuuuuuge.
Further it is not AS profitable for carryover to work the full range press as it used to be, precisely because you cannot under any circumstances “press-out” a jerk in competition for a good lift. You HAVE to get under the bar immediately for it to count. So yes, the movements involve the same muscle groups and yes the press is great for shoulder strength and conditioning, but NO, I do not that the press should have more value assigned to it than it currently does. Or if so, then not by a whole lot.
Our team problems stem from other issues entirely IMHO. Many of them have already been stated, but I do not believe “raw strength” is one of them. I have a brother who coaches olympic lifting, and competes. He has fairly extensive knowledge of the OTC and his coach, who I also know, has visited to train there and coach there. I have not picked his brain, but from his occasional rants of frustration with the OTC, much of our problems stem not from not-strong-enough, but from taking breaks from heavy maximal lifts to work technique in a reductionist manner, as opposed to working with the competitive lifts or their close variations to try to fix the “flaw” instead of keeping the athlete in touch with heavy challenging weights while using different cues and/or variations of lifts to track timing, drop, pull height, whatever.
Basically, as he puts it: we have the best technology in the world, and we know it. And we suck because of it. We rely too much on technology (obligatory Rocky 4 reference) in isolation of the real work and “art” of the process. Basically, he’s seen it happen where, if a lifter’s power output is not high enough under a max weight–or if the pull height is wrong–then they’ll take him out of the groove where he needs to be to fix his own mistake or to learn under variations, and they will throw him under “specific drills” to fix the pull height or power output instead. Basically this is akin to taking a guy with a sticking point halfway in his bench and having him perform lots of isometrics and high rep/explosive bottom half benches with light weights WHILE taking him away from heavy full range benching until the machine predicts he is at the right number/range.
That approach doesn’t work in powerlifting and it won’t work in Olympic lifting. It has nothing to do with the strength levels as a whole (specific athletes maybe, I dunno, but not system wide). It is a mindset/coaching method problem. It’s the elite level equivalent of not changing your coaching cues for a guy who’s “not getting it” when you tell him one cue.
