…lifting flat footed and jumping backwards.
I just watched this and tried their style of lifting for the clean pulls. I was able to lift a lot more weight.
Does anyone have any opinions on their style of lifting , as they claim it is fairly unorthodox with most people going up on the toes.
I could do snatch pulls OK that way , but was struggling with the clean pulls. Their way does seem more natural to me.
I am still working on my flexibility to rack the bar…
Where did you get the DVD? Crain’s Muscle World?
Dan John has talked about this before and models his coaching style from it.
The eastern block countries do this…
Main points: try and stay over, if you go back ‘because of finishing the pull’ so be it, BUT BE CONSISTENT. If you do go too far or not enough and the bar doesn’t = fail
Try and keep the bar close to you.
I try to go on to my toes but rarely do on the Cleans in my videos. Why? I’m too concerned on opening up and pulling myself underneath the bar!
Do pulls the way you do your lifts. If they are differen’t it isn’t specific enough.
Record a video and lets see. Some lifters really go up on to their toes and others don’t.
The jumping backwards shouldn’t be a jump in itself, it’s a fall back because of REALLY FINISHING THE PULL.
Koing
I am going to wait until next and try this style with the snatch pull and see if it makes any difference.
I am bit worried I am not completing the pull and just dropping under using this style.
Re WCC
It’s difficult for me to tell but they don’t teach going up on the toes at all, even with light weights. They use Shane Harman (as a demonstrator) throughout the clean and jerk video
and videos of
Gardev in the snatch, they teach a slight jump back (that’s their terminology at least)
I think Gardev is the guy at in Ironmind video below at 1.30. It is Gardev, there’s a caption.
Here’s a video of Shane Hamman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM6FvCH
Here’s Don McCauley. He calls this the “catapult” style. I’m an old masters lifter so the “old school” triple extension is fine by me. What would concern me about jumping back is missing lifts out in front. I already have a bad habit of doing that so I don’t need anything that could make that worse.
Thanks Mike,
It is the same style as in WCC video. The WCC video is a lot longer and more detailed.
From what I understand , they teach pulling the weight slightly backwards too.
I was quite interested in his comments about the heavier lifts not improving sprinting speed.
He used sprinting as an exception in the video saying , they could use triple extension.
I don’t really have aspirations of competing in olympic lifting, I want to use them to improve my running speed and for fun.
Do you have anymore links to Olympic lifting videos like this. I have the Newton one, which I bought in a specialist sports shop, which I saw by chance in Central London.
I have seen Tommy Kono one, and Chad Ikea.I have the Jim Schmitz one somewhere too. i can’t remember how he teaches to lift.
I’ll try and get some videos of me lifting soon.
thank you all for your advice.
D, I’m pretty sure that Schmitz teaches triple extension. The thing is, I don’t think that what McCauley teaches is radically different from triple extension, other than what he has Anthony Martin doing which is to start with his shoulders behind the bar. I think a lot depends on how you interpret “triple extension.” In the third video, McCauley gets into a good discussion of what can go wrong when coaches interpret triple extension to mean “jump.” Then athletes start landing with leg in California and the other in New York, they may lean forward to catch the bar, or both. These are bad things. And Don is right that when you and the bar are in the air, you can’t exert any force on the bar and you can’t exert any force to pull yourself under the bar. At that point you and the bar are just floating in space in a low earth orbit. Don is correct that there is no reason to leave the ground. All you need to do is break contact so you can shift your feet out a little wider to get a wider base to get into a squat to receive the bar.
Bottom line is that I don’t think you need to throw away all of the lessons of triple extension. What you need to do is avoid the bad habits that Don mentioned in the third video. I think that triple extension is an excellent teaching method because it encourages a lifter to finish the pull. What happens to many lifters once the weight gets heavy and they need to get lower to receive the bar is that they become so concerned about getting under the bar that they don’t finish the pull. And as Koing pointed out, eventually you’ll develop your own preference as to how far to extend on your toes. Some lifters really get up there while some don’t.
[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
And Don is right that when you and the bar are in the air, you can’t exert any force on the bar and you can’t exert any force to pull yourself under the bar. At that point you and the bar are just floating in space in a low earth orbit. Don is correct that there is no reason to leave the ground. All you need to do is break contact so you can shift your feet out a little wider to get a wider base to get into a squat to receive the bar.[/quote]
This is something I’ve never understood when people talk about it. Even if you are in the air, you absolutely can exert force on the bar and pull yourself underneath it. I think that time in the air is still wasted because you are no longer exerting meaningful upward acceleration, but you can still pull against the bar with your traps/arms and separate yourself from the bar in a downward direction.
[quote]Dr. Manhattan wrote:
[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
And Don is right that when you and the bar are in the air, you can’t exert any force on the bar and you can’t exert any force to pull yourself under the bar. At that point you and the bar are just floating in space in a low earth orbit. Don is correct that there is no reason to leave the ground. All you need to do is break contact so you can shift your feet out a little wider to get a wider base to get into a squat to receive the bar.[/quote]
This is something I’ve never understood when people talk about it. Even if you are in the air, you absolutely can exert force on the bar and pull yourself underneath it. I think that time in the air is still wasted because you are no longer exerting meaningful upward acceleration, but you can still pull against the bar with your traps/arms and separate yourself from the bar in a downward direction. [/quote]
Sort of. Remember that things change once the weight gets heavier. With just the bar, I could probably leap in the air as high as I could and snatch the bar overhead while still in the air. Couldn’t do that with even 50 kg. I agree that you can, to a point, pull yourself downward against the bar while off of the ground. At some point in its trajectory the bar becomes weightless and you then pull yourself down. But it’s not something I would encourage.
This is one of the reasons why I advise caution with playing with techniques such as starting with your shoulders behind the bar and jumping backwards to catch it. I can do all sorts of crazy stuff with light weight - not keeping the bar as close to the body as I should, jumping back, all not a problem with light weight. However, these problems become magnified almost exponentially with every additional 5 kg on the bar.
And this brings me back to my point about triple extension. Don’s main problem with it seems to be the part where you rise up on your toes (plantar flexion). But except for the guy who jumps back, he still believes in keeping the hips low, the shoulders over the bar, rebending of the knees (“the scoop”), and a strong trap shrug. These are all things taught with triple extension. And from my own experience, as the weight gets heavy, I have less and less plantar flexion to the point where I only break contact with the ground for a fraction of an inch to move my feet out to get a wider base. I sure as hell can’t get big air with 90 kg on the bar. So, the increase in weight corrects for what Don sees as a “flaw” in the triple extension technique. However, I maintain my original position that teaching the triple extension to include a full shrug and maximum plantar flexion makes for a good teaching tool and encourages lifters to finish the pull.
Just my opinion and I may be totally wrong.
[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
[quote]Dr. Manhattan wrote:
[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
And Don is right that when you and the bar are in the air, you can’t exert any force on the bar and you can’t exert any force to pull yourself under the bar. At that point you and the bar are just floating in space in a low earth orbit. Don is correct that there is no reason to leave the ground. All you need to do is break contact so you can shift your feet out a little wider to get a wider base to get into a squat to receive the bar.[/quote]
This is something I’ve never understood when people talk about it. Even if you are in the air, you absolutely can exert force on the bar and pull yourself underneath it. I think that time in the air is still wasted because you are no longer exerting meaningful upward acceleration, but you can still pull against the bar with your traps/arms and separate yourself from the bar in a downward direction. [/quote]
Sort of. Remember that things change once the weight gets heavier. With just the bar, I could probably leap in the air as high as I could and snatch the bar overhead while still in the air. Couldn’t do that with even 50 kg. I agree that you can, to a point, pull yourself downward against the bar while off of the ground. At some point in its trajectory the bar becomes weightless and you then pull yourself down. But it’s not something I would encourage.
This is one of the reasons why I advise caution with playing with techniques such as starting with your shoulders behind the bar and jumping backwards to catch it. I can do all sorts of crazy stuff with light weight - not keeping the bar as close to the body as I should, jumping back, all not a problem with light weight. However, these problems become magnified almost exponentially with every additional 5 kg on the bar.
And this brings me back to my point about triple extension. Don’s main problem with it seems to be the part where you rise up on your toes (plantar flexion). But except for the guy who jumps back, he still believes in keeping the hips low, the shoulders over the bar, rebending of the knees (“the scoop”), and a strong trap shrug. These are all things taught with triple extension. And from my own experience, as the weight gets heavy, I have less and less plantar flexion to the point where I only break contact with the ground for a fraction of an inch to move my feet out to get a wider base. I sure as hell can’t get big air with 90 kg on the bar. So, the increase in weight corrects for what Don sees as a “flaw” in the triple extension technique. However, I maintain my original position that teaching the triple extension to include a full shrug and maximum plantar flexion makes for a good teaching tool and encourages lifters to finish the pull.
Just my opinion and I may be totally wrong.[/quote]
In response to Dr Manhattan I agree that it is definitely possible to pull yourself down while you and the bar are in the air however I think it comes down to a control thing. If your feet aren’t on the floor you have no place of reference to set yourself in the right place. You’re just pulling under the bar and so are probably more likely to catch in the wrong position. Not sure if that’s true or not but it seems to make logical sense to me
Also, if you think about total energy it doesn’t make sense to come off the ground. The goal is to exert as much force on the bar to drive it upwards. Coming too far off the ground could be showing a lack of ability to transfer the force you generate into the bar to lift it. If you pull with the same amount of force but one time you come 5cm off the ground (exaggerated I know) and the other time only come off for 1 cm (just to skip your feet out) the bar is going to go higher in the second example as more of the force is used lifting the bar than you.
What you have written Mike makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for clearing up some stuff!
I completely agree that coming up into the air is worthless. I think that once you finish your extension with your hips and knees, you’ve put your biggest acceleration on the bar and you might as well start to get underneath it with a powerful shrug down and arm pull. I think that is the real danger in going up in the air - its just wasting time letting the bar float!
But still, it doesn’t matter how heavy the bar is, physics is physics. If you and the bar are off the ground, when you pull against it with your traps and arms, you will accelerate yourself downwards and the bar upwards. (Keep in mind that the acceleration on the bar might be far less than gravity) The heavier the bar becomes, the more of that acceleration will go towards the lifter and the less it will go to the bar if we assume that the force production by the lifter’s traps and arms is roughly the same.
I think that Don’s point is that we should initiate this trap and arm pull immediately after imparting our greatest force on the bar as opposed to focusing on ‘getting taller’ with our calves since that doesn’t necessarily serve to accelerate the bar further, it just adds another couple of inches. He wants the focus to not be on calf extension and to teach a faster reverse in direction.