Before I get started, I do several minutes of warming and stretching, especially for my tight hamstrings.
I get out there on the floor, hold that bar up high above my head and slighty behind, and I descend.
But as I’m descending, man does my body ever want to “fold forward”. The bar wants to swing to the front of my head, my back wants to bow forward into some sort of good morning, my knees want to jut way out there. As I try to keep my spine in a slight arch or netural curve, it feels so stiff as I descend, and my body seems to say to me, “I am not limber enough to make this feel natural.”
Here come the questions.
(1) Is there a “money” stretch or two to be practising to make these easier? Or maybe just doing them at home with a broom stick over and over to stretch out the muscles?
(2) Do you break at the knee first or at the hip with this descent? Like if I was power squatting back onto a box I would make a tight arch, break at the hip and push my butt back. If I were back squatting for my quads I would break at the knee and try to maintain a neutral spine and go straight down.
(3) Any other thoughts on technique? Obviously on the ascent you don’t want your hips coming up before your shoulders…
Sometimes people have some very insightful tips for exercises like “think of pushing your feet through the floor” or “pull the bar apart” or similar, just wondering if there are some gems for OHS that could make things come together.
What are experiencing is completely normal. OHS’s are physiologically impossible for a normal human being.
All the pictures you see of OHS’s are done in Photoshop, they are not real.
The OHS is like crop circles, ufo’s and visitors.
When someone says they’ve seen it done or, more preposterously, they’ve actually done one, just think of the people who claim they’ve been taken by aliens. Most likely they are the same people.
Face facts - the human body is meant to fall forward on its face when you try to squat down while holding a heavy weight over your head at arm’s length. This is an adaptive reflex. After landing on your face a few times, you realize man was not built to do this and you stop doing it.
And next time you see a ‘picture’ of an OHS, look at the position of the shoulders. The only other time you will see a joint in this position is when you break a drumstick off a roast chicken or turkey.
Clearly OHS’s are a hoax perpetrated on the weight lifting public to make normal people feel inferior and doubt themselves. They are the creation of the devil or maybe some more sinister plot.
I don’t know that there is a magic bullet stretch that helps. It takes time.
A few thoughts:
=You may be using too much weight. Progress on OHS is very slow, go light until you have the form nailed.
=Pulling the bar apart has done wonders for me in keeping the bar back, although my weakness in this lift still is keeping the bar back when coming out of the hole. When the bar starts to come forward, I find it hard to keep my elbows locked out.
=I break at the knees as far as possible before breaking at the hips. I try to keep the hips as still as possible. You should be trying to sit down between your knees.
=I take a wider stance than I would on Front Squats and my toes point out slightly. This is the only way I can keep my heels on the floor all the way through the lift. Keeping your heels down also makes it easier to keep the bar back.
OHS demand and develop flexibility just about everywhere, from the wrists through the shoulders and the hips down to the knees and the ankles.
Starting out by working with a broomstick makes sense for the sake of stretching and getting used to the movement, but if you can do it with an empty bar, do it with the bar and then gradually increase.
Make sure your hands are spaced sufficiently widely apart when gripping the bar. I can imagine that using a realtively narrow grip is a relatively common mistake.
I would say to work on your flexibility in the glutes, hams, and calves/achilles. OHS ARE possible, but not easy. Do ALOT of arched back squats with no weight when you warm up. It will get better. But if you are really inflexible, you need to improve.
Weightlifters are NOT aliens, but possibly uebermenschen in terms of strength and speed. Watch those guys with double body weight from a full squat come up to finish a snatch. Unbelievable.
One advantage of living in Europe - small-time sports such as weightlifting are televised! Not just NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL (remember hockey??). The European weightlifting championships were about 2 weeks ago with great coverage. Reallly humbling to watch light girls snatching more than I can at a bodyweight of 85-90 kg.
I had the privaledge of work for a former Oly lifter, whom was also an alternate on the '84 Oly team. The biggest thing he taught me was shoulder mobility is key to for this movement.
Get yourself a broomstick, do shoulder dislocates with it at a grip width approximate to your snatch grip width. As you build mobility move you hands in. You can also perform this with a jumpstretch/ironwoody band. (My boss did them with an Oly bar, I wouldnt recomend this).
Hip flexibility and calf flexibility are also important. You can build the flexibility needed by doing the lift, start with you feet wide (maybe even stick a 10 pound plate under you heals) to start and slowly over time move your feet in.
One other little trick he taught me, when the bar is over head rotate your arm at the shoulder so your elbow points behind you. Now your arm will act like one straight support instead of two with a hinge in the middle.
Hope this helps, they are possible they just take time to learn. Be patient, you’ll be rewarded with an upper back and shoulders with thick slabs of muscle.
One thing that really seems to help when I teach people is the rest period…I know it sounds crazy, but we do two clusters of three sets of 8 with one minute rest.
For one thing: you do 48 reps! That has to help!
For the other, we find that just pumping up and down and not worrying so much about every detail seems to really get the groove. For an adult, I usually have them do
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 65 pounds
a normal rest…three minutes or so
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 95 pounds.
The improvement is really obvious…I have had wives say “Yes, that’s better” and it is maybe the first time the person has ever seen the lift.
[quote]Danny John wrote:
One thing that really seems to help when I teach people is the rest period…I know it sounds crazy, but we do two clusters of three sets of 8 with one minute rest.
For one thing: you do 48 reps! That has to help!
For the other, we find that just pumping up and down and not worrying so much about every detail seems to really get the groove. For an adult, I usually have them do
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 65 pounds
a normal rest…three minutes or so
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 95 pounds.
The improvement is really obvious…I have had wives say “Yes, that’s better” and it is maybe the first time the person has ever seen the lift. [/quote]
Please don’t tell me you’ve had wives doing 95 pound OHS or I may just sell my weights and take up yoga;)
meaning wives doing 3x8 with 95 lbs with 60 sec rest periods.
DB
P.S. I read your treatise on life from the 8th grade graduation and then gave it to my wife to read. Our consensus: brilliant! It is full of wisdom that I will try to impart on my kids.
[quote]Danny John wrote:
One thing that really seems to help when I teach people is the rest period…I know it sounds crazy, but we do two clusters of three sets of 8 with one minute rest.
For one thing: you do 48 reps! That has to help!
For the other, we find that just pumping up and down and not worrying so much about every detail seems to really get the groove. For an adult, I usually have them do
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 65 pounds
a normal rest…three minutes or so
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 95 pounds.
The improvement is really obvious…I have had wives say “Yes, that’s better” and it is maybe the first time the person has ever seen the lift. [/quote]
Dan,
That’s beautiful! 48 reps wow! Cool way of putting it together.I’m sure in addition to “greasing the groove” that also has a metabolic/fat burning effect doesn’t it? Nowadays you always hear people talking about doing 8 sets of 3 or 8 sets of 1 but not 3 sets of 8 twice. Makes sense though. I guess more practice = better technique.
I’m going to make power snatches/overhead squats and clean and presses my two major lifts.
Regarding clean/pressing (I want to increase my power clean and military press)-would you recommend focusing solely on dumbbell clean and presses to strengthen weak side press (left side for most people)or mostly focusing on total weight and utilizing barbells? Should I use something similiar rep wise (48 reps) w/the clean/pressing as the overhead squatting or just do say 10 sets of singles?
I’ve been doing OHS for three weeks now and can tell you that shoulder flexibility is supremely important. I’m not gifted in that area and progress on these is going to be SLOW. I’m focusing on doing multiple sets (8-10) with as perfect a form as I can manage and jumping in increments of no more than five pounds when a weight starts to feel light.
The damn bar still wants to fall on my head (or forward) when I get near parallel, but my execution has gotten a lot better after only three workouts. Like the previous posts have said—focus on the execution and forget about how much weight you’re not using.
Get yourself a broomstick, do shoulder dislocates with it at a grip width approximate to your snatch grip width. As you build mobility move you hands in. You can also perform this with a jumpstretch/ironwoody band. (My boss did them with an Oly bar, I wouldnt recomend this).
[quote]
How do you do the shoulder dislocates? Any pictures, videos around that can show the correct form?
I’ve humiliated myself at other boards trying to beat this evil. I finally got it going by first cheating a little, and then improving with reps. I let my feet frog out and made my stance about 6 inches wider. The shoulder dislocations mentioned above are great ways of working into the OHS.
For me, sets of 30 deep OHS with the broomstick set up the grove. By 15-16, I start bringing in my stance. The shoulders start to really loosen up. I actually try to get in at least 3 sets a day. Then, I do high rep sets with 30-40 lbs. Take your time, I’ve been fighting this battle for two years.
So that’s the “learning” workout - 2 sets of clusters; one with 10’s on the bar, one with 25’s on the bar.
Cool. Thanks.
So once their groove has improved, do you stick with a similar routine and just start adding weight to the bar?
[quote]Danny John wrote:
One thing that really seems to help when I teach people is the rest period…I know it sounds crazy, but we do two clusters of three sets of 8 with one minute rest.
For one thing: you do 48 reps! That has to help!
For the other, we find that just pumping up and down and not worrying so much about every detail seems to really get the groove. For an adult, I usually have them do
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 65 pounds
a normal rest…three minutes or so
3 sets of 8 with a minute rest with 95 pounds.
The improvement is really obvious…I have had wives say “Yes, that’s better” and it is maybe the first time the person has ever seen the lift. [/quote]
To be honest, 165 for 3 sets of 8 with one minute rest is one of those “great” workouts that looks very small on a piece of paper, but really is a benchmark for me that I am “around” good condition. I usually do Front Squats (3 X 8) as part of this workout, too.
Question for the group on the subject of shoulder flexibility. I get a shrp pain in my shoulder with OHS, behind the neck press, or even standard squats with my arms in a close grip. Any suggestions? at 42, I do not want to “work through the pain”. Have too many friends with surgery scars on their shoulders from doing this.
One stretch that I have found particularly useful for overhead squats goes like this:
interlace your fingers behind your head
get your feet into position
squat straight down while keeping your heels firmly on the ground and your back arched
I know it sounds simple but this stretch has really helped me to learn the bottom positions for the O lifts.
I also found starting out with my heels on a 2x4 to be very helpful. I then progressed to a 1x4, and eventually got to where I could do them with my heels on the floor.
If you need more in depth help on the various aspects of Olympic lifting you might want to try the Jim Schmitz video from ironmind.
As an above average Olympic lifter and strength and conditioning coach, overhead squats are a great tool to improve your snatch, flexibility, and develop overall strength. My HS athletes OHS every training day. Some are using 80kg for 2 sets of five. Some of the keys to success are to lock out the elbows, push up on the bar, and twist the hands against the bar counter clockwise. I use/teach breaking at the hip first. Breaking at the knee first will use up the ankles ROM resulting in a shin angle not conducive to the OHS. Also, Pavel’s tension method or bracing result in better spinal stabilization. Hope this helps.
It helps to push your knees apart as far as possible. You know the sensation that you feel in your hip when you do a static lunge hip flexor stretch and you try to push your hip forward so that the line of your hips is perpendicular to the line of your legs? Get that feeling, and try to duplicate in the bottom of your overhead squat. Hold that position for a ten seconds under tension, relax, and let yourself drop deeper.