28 May The G-Force Source: swallowing pride, correcting faults
“All men make mistakes but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
— Sophocles
We’re all human and therefore, we’re all susceptible to human tendencies. We all eat, drink, poop (including you ladies), experience flatulence, vomit for a myriad of reasons, we’re susceptible to obesity, malnutrition and every other horrible thing known to us, the human race. Pride is one of those horrible things too, as are mistakes. Swallowing one’s pride, however, and addressing that mistake is a feat not so common to common human tendencies.
We speak of mistakes in this edition of The G-Force Source but focus more on faults; the reason being, we have our in-house weightlifting competition coming up on the 3rd of June (8am start at G-Force) and we’re here to discuss common faults and their corrections in weightlifting.
Weightlifting is a massive part of CrossFit programming and it’s massively a part of our programming at G-Force. We immensely enjoy seeing you all gain new personal bests in your Olympic lifts and we hope to experience that same enjoyment over and over. Keep in mind that the smallest adjustments in your technique can make a large impact in your overall lift, hence we have this week’s Source on correcting errors.
Shooting the butt like a bad stripper at a strip club
This is one of the most common problems in both the snatch and the clean. Lifters are unable to engage their massive quads (and we know they’re massive because y’all always squattin’) and instead have too much posterior load causing a bad bar path. When the butt shoots, usually there is too much shoulder over the bar, the weight is too far towards the front of the foot and more often than not, to catch the bar, the lifter ends up chasing the bar forward because their body has swung and shifted like a pendulum to correct itself.
Correction: In your set-up for your lift, start with your butt lower, chest up and chin up, shoulders back and down to switch on the lats and lastly, if you haven’t yet shifted your weight to the back of the foot to switch those huge quads on, lift your toes up off the ground and you should now feel the pressure in the legs. Next, use your legs to start the lift and at the same time continue to raise the bar off the ground with the chest high to keep the pressure in your legs. Hopefully, your stripper butt has stayed lower this time.
Cutting your pull is as bad as cutting your mates’ grass
In both the snatch and the clean, we tend to see undercutting of the pull. You’ll hear this referred to as, “not enough extension.” By this we mean that you’re not pulling the bar as high as you can get it to then actively pull yourself under the bar for the catch. Not extending enough in your lifts has one clear result: you’re not going to catch it or if you do, you’re going for a long run forward to try and get it over the centre of your body like you would have if you pulled the bar high enough.
Correction: Pull! Sounds simple but sometimes it isn’t, especially under maximal load. It is very important in your warm up for your lifts that you emphasise your pulling by make sure you extend onto your toes at the same time as shrugging aggressively, followed by pulling the bar with your arms high enough that your elbows are higher than the bar. We tend to see lifters pull the bar backwards like they’re trying to row the bar back. Think more of a scarecrow; elbows high and hands low. Practice that high extension in your warm-ups and continue it as you add the weight. Feel the pull on your toes with your elbows high before actively pulling yourself under the bar.
All dip, no drive
Onto the jerk. Many people love dipping and sometimes so far that they’ve just performed half of a front squat. In that deep dip, the lifter gets buried and driving out of that dip becomes too hard. Even if the lifter hasn’t gone too deep in the dip, we still see little-to-no drive resulting in a very difficult jerk. Without drive, that bar isn’t going to fly off your shoulders and you’re going to be required to press much harder than you actually should and therefore, it may result in a no lift.
Correction: Be explosive like someone’s just put fireworks in your rear end. The idea of the drive is to throw the bar off the shoulders with such force, all you’re required to do is meet the bar in the air by catching under it. This doesn’t mean you don’t punch the arms hard; you’re still required to do that. You’re going to get much more air time with that bar if you explode out of that dip. Think about coming out of that dip, extending at the hips and knees, coming up onto your toes, shrugging aggressively with the shoulders, then thinking about getting some air time by clearing your feet from the floor. All that’s left is the split of the feet, the catch and the recovery. In your warm up, you will get air time with an empty bar. As you add weight, that’s not going to happen. We want you to experience the feeling of that explosive drive upwards to throw the bar off the shoulders for an easier and cleaner jerk.
We could go on and on about faults but these are it for now. If you need more tips, see your coaches leading up to our in-house comp. We hope to see all of G-Force there for a fun morning.
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