11 Sep The G-Force Source: We turn six!
“Never forget where you came from.”
– Glen Laws, Head Coach and Creator/Owner of G-Force CrossFit
Not everyone is fortunate enough to experience the feelings and exhilaration of the leaps and bounds leading to success and great achievement. Those who have worked hard for that success, stayed motivated and chased their goals will experience those feelings. But sometimes, those successful types can lose sight of the struggles of starting out, and they forget where they came from.
The moral of that short rant is this: On September 14th, this Wednesday, G-Force CrossFit will celebrate its sixth birthday. It’ll be six years since Glen turned G-Laws Fitness, his small personal training business, into G-Force CrossFit. As you can see in our feature image, Glen reminded himself in G-Force’s earliest days to never forget where he came from. That is a very true reflection of the attitude and mindset of not only Glen, but also for G-Force CrossFit where those that train with us will say that we have a very welcoming, friendly and ego-free environment to train in.
To celebrate this momentous occasion with all our athletes, supporters, friends and families, Glen is going to be hosting a bring-a-friend BBQ on the 15th of October. We will plan a fun celebratory WOD in the morning followed by a free BBQ. Yes, free. So bring your friends, bring your families, bring your dogs (but please no cats) and we hope to have a great morning with you all.
As you would have seen in tomorrow’s WOD, we’re beginning max week. Tomorrow we have max snatch and max front squat. In the following days, expect to see a max clean & jerk and max back squat. These max lifts will hopefully be the culmination of your consistency with the training and our programming over recent weeks which have seen a build up of technique-based and percentage-based movements. Don’t fret or be afraid of max week. If you don’t achieve a new personal best, your training will continue. For this week’s lifting-based parts of the WOD, work up to a heavy set and stay there. If you’re feeling good, go for a max attempt, but do not keep going till you fail. Achieve a lift you’re happy with, even if it’s one kilogram over your best, and go home satisfied. If you don’t know your max for the lifts coming up this week, this is an opportunity to gauge where you’re at and know your percentages. If an empty bar is your max snatch, we applaud you just as much as someone with weight on their bar. It is all relative to you as an individual.
To assist with your snatch tomorrow, continue reading below as we go over some snatch guidance posted in a previous edition of the Source.
Before we part, we will once again be pushing to see our athletes participate in an open weightlifting competition on the 16th of October. That’s the day after the G-Force birthday BBQ. It is an open comp for people of all experience levels. It will be a new experience for you, and we hope to see you all enter and expand your horizons. Don’t keep doing the same ol’ thing.
Place your names on the whiteboard so we know you will attend.
See you all in the gym.
THE G-FORCE MOVEMENT BANK
Snatch Overview
The snatch is by far the most complex movement in CrossFit. It causes anger, frustration, sadness, and depression. But more so anger. We’ve seen it. The poor equipment at G-Force has been subject to some post-snatch anger-fueled abuse. It takes countless years to achieve a good understanding on how to perform the movement. Some of the world’s best weightlifters struggle with the movement, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
With the snatch, you will find that some of the smallest adjustments can make the largest differences on performing a good snatch. There are many pointers to think about, and at G-Force, we try to communicate those pointers across to you as often as we can. Not everyone is the same and a lot of you require different pointers for different faults. But generally, the set-up and execution of the movement will remain the same.
Barbell Shrugged offers some great videos on how to perform a snatch. In this video, they offer a short five minute overview of the movement, but they have additional videos where they break the movement down for ease of learning.
What we want to see in your snatches is that you start at the bottom in the set-up very tight, switching all your large muscle groups on; shoulders back and down, back tight, head up, hammies engaged. Depending on your height, your hand placement and feet width with vary. As you pull the bar, pull it off the ground smoothly without yanking the bar. Start by pushing through the legs and not pulling with the arms; we want to avoid pulling early with the arms and bending at the elbows. As the bar leaves the floor, move the knees back to allow a straight path for the bar. As you pass the knees, speed up and start bringing your hips through. Your knees remain bent, they come underneath and through the bar whilst you have a vertical torso with the arms still straight. Brush the bar. By this, we mean that contact with your hips and the bar creating that momentum to help drive that bar up. Once you brush, extend up onto the toes whilst at the same time shrugging aggressively with the traps. Then, pull hard with the arms by bringing the elbows up and back, and you may if required create the slight lay-back where you lean back to extend further as your elbows come up and back. As your bar reaches its peak vertical point, actively pull yourself under the bar by throwing your feet out from their original starting position, pressing up hard with the shoulders to lock them out to hold the bar, and allow yourself to drop into a nice squat position with the bar directly overhead. Once you’ve caught the bar, without rushing, stand up to full lock-out to complete the snatch.
In a nutshell, that’s the snatch. Enjoy!
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