Understanding what you should feel is far more important than knowing points of performance when it comes to coaching AND being an athlete.
Today I’m gonna break this idea down with the most difficult movement we do, and hopefully you will have some brain blasts along the way and see an immediate pay off in your lifting this week.
What You Should Feel In The Snatch
The snatch is a movement that tests our ability to take load from the ground to overhead in one fluid motion that involves aspects from the deadlift, wall angels, urlachers, and the overhead squat. The latter being what most people believes makes or breaks their ability to do this well. Those people are mostly right, but the movements before are what can make your life significantly easier.
To become a snatch master, you must first learn what you should feel in your Setup Position.
The Set-Up Position OR Floor Position
For the sake of brevity, we are going to assume you’ve done this movement before. (You go to Vegvisir, we love this movement, it’s a safe assumption).
In the set-up you’ll hear coaches say “Knuckles Down”, “Knees Out”, and “Brace Your Core” as key group cues. Here’s what they mean:
Knuckles Down: This means have the longest part of your finger, parallel to the ground. What should do is create a tightness in your forearms, a squeeze in your armpit, and tension in your mid back. This keeps the barbell close and your spine safe under load (your back shouldn’t’ bend at all in this movement).
Knees Out: I personally like to tell you to push your knees into your elbow pits. When you do this cue right, it should bring your chest up and you should feel the top of your quad receive some tension and the side of your butt (where it dimples when you squeeze) should be overcome with pressure. This takes pressure off the back, activates the main mover of this movement (the hips), and raises the chest for you to get better leverage on the bar when you make contact later.
Brace Your Core: This doesn’t mean squeeze your abs, yet this is what I see a good amount of us do when we are told this. Think over your trunk like a soda can. Right now it is dented on all sides and I need you to fix those dents. Fill your torso from your chest cavity to your pelvic floor and your spine to your belly button with as much air as possible. That tension you feel all the way around, that is your braced core. This makes your strong and keeps your spine as safe as it can be under load.
Next we approach: The Pull
The main gripe your coach will give you is the ol’ cue “Stripper Butt”
Stripper Butt: This is when your hips raise at a faster speed than your chest. Ideally in this movement, once we have our pretty Set-Up position down, the chest and hips DO NOT CHANGE RELATIVE POSITION UNTIL THE BAR REACHES A LITTLE ABOVE MID THIGH. The way you fix this is by staring at a point on the wall and trace a line upward. Usually it is the looking down at the bar trying to miraculously catch ourselves messing up when we raise the hips higher.
The reason you want to keep the same relative position of hips and shoulders is all related to your contact with the bar. If your hips are high, they have to come back more. Which means they will need to move forward more as well, providing forward force to the bar and pushing it forward. Making your overhead squat that much harder.
If you’re doing The Pull right, you should be feeling nearly all the same things you feel at the Set-Up. You are now just supporting the weight so it should feel strenuous but not grinding.
The part I have to talk with nearly every male about, CONTACT
This is the point where your hips and groin muscle literally meet the bar with UPWARD force. After all, that is where you want the bar to go, directly up (with a small curve for you experts).
The cue our coaches use most is “Be Aggressive”
Be Aggressive: What they really mean is you should be trying to annihilate that piece of steel. Not like a bat meeting a baseball. More like a catapult launching a rock that was just dropped in that cup.
The whole goal of the pull is to load that barbell into your hip pocket. Once that barbell touches the top of your hip flexor (the most prominent muscle at the top of your leg when you squeeze your quad).
Once it is there, your hips come into quick contact with the bar and throw it overhead.
This small detail between a catapult and a punch of the hips is the different between hitting your pubic bone (which we all will do) and making that solid *rattle rattle* noise off the barbell. It shouldn’t feel painful at all when you do it as your flexors should take the brunt of the contact.
Gentlemen, if you hit the thing you’re afraid of hitting, don’t be. The part that actually hurts is out of the way entirely if you are pushing out your knees. I have been snatching for 10+ years and am totally fine. I even have 2 kids.
Lastly, The Catch
This one is where I hope to make the most change in your life. Because this is the part that holds everyone back once the other parts are satisfied (which they should be satisfied first).
Mobility is a big factor here and addressing all of the different pitfalls can feel overwhelming, so let me give you a system to improve and focus on one thing at a time.
Firstly, locking that barbell over head is crucial. I want you to muscle snatch until you have this down at standing.
A proper lockout is usually reference by the cue “Lock Out” or “Punch/Punch The Sky.”
Lock Out: What we are trying to communicate is that your arm should be as straight as straight can be. You know that you’ve done this when you feel you’re tricep (the muscle on the back of the upper half of your arm) is squeezed as well as the lat (your big arm pit muscle that attaches to your spine). If you’re unsure how this should feel, do a bench dip and push your butt as far away from the floor as you can (that is your tricep that is screaming). For the lat, stick your hand is your armpit and squeeze that hand with your armpit while trying to pull your shoulder as far down as back as it will go. Now you can say “Hello Lat”.
To make that feeling happen with a barbell overhead, create that extended arm from the bench dip feeling with your arm overhead. Then aim your armpit at the wall in front of you and your elbow pit to the sky. Rotate your shoulder down and back as far as you can and you should feel tension from your mid-back all the way to the attachment of your tricep at your elbow (not a ton, just a little).
From there, you can add depth to your overhead squat/catch as you feel that exact tension overhead.
As you get lower, if the arms rotate forward then you have a mid back tightness issue.
Fixes mid movement: Squeeze tighter in your mid back and squeeze your armpit tighter.
Fixes in between sets or mobilization after: Bench Stretch, Bully Stretch, Lat Smash, and Foam Roller on your upper back with arms hanging overhead.
If you can maintain this but then your torso starts to lean forward it would be either the hips or your ankles.
How your coach decides which is the issue:
Hips: Your tailbone starts to tuck underneath and your knees start trending inwards.
Ankles: You feel that tilt and your heels come off the ground.
You can can adjust mid movement:
Hips: Drive your knees out (just like in the set-up and pull). Squeeze your glutes where they dimple and try to move pressure to the outside of your foot.
Ankles: You have to think about making your calves as long as possible. This is the hardest adjustment mid movement to make.
Things you can do in between sets or mobilization after:
Hips: 5-10 Squat Therapy Squats where you pause where this exact issue happens and you teach your body where it needs to begin pushing the knees out to fix this, then reapply light load and teach your body it needs to do this no matter the weight. Also, Pigeon Stretch, Figure Four, and Bottom of Squat Holds Help.
Ankles: Low Dragon Stretch and Runner’s Stretch can help The thing that has helped me best is holding the bottom of a squat for 10 minutes a day and for a couple weeks focus on getting those heels closer and closer to the ground until they touch. It’ll take less and less time each day ya do it. When you can do it within the first minute, you should be able to apply this in your lift.
When you catch a barbell perfectly in the bottom of a squat, that barbell should feel like it has hit a pocket where you feel all the tension in the mid back to the triceps locking out. You quads, glutes, and hips should feel the load and as you stand up, that barbell moves straight up.
If the barbell moved forward, address the entire list above and trouble shoot.
If the barbell went backwards, then you did everything well except you squatted too fast for how high you put that bar.
If you have questions or an issue in the snatch I didn’t address in this blog, please respond to this email!
If there ya like this style of blog and you want another movement covered, respond with that movement and I’ll make a post for that.
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