The snatch is one of the most complex exercises we can perform and as it is executed at speed it is also has a lot of potential to go wrong.
I'm going to give you 5 easy tips to help you achieve more success with the snatch!
1. Set up;
Your set up should be identical every time so you can perform a repeatable successful snatch every time. Line your bottom shoe lace under the bar, put your hands on the bar in your snatch grip ( make sure you hook grip ! ) and then drop your shins to the bar. This should bring you into an ideal starting position, you may need to adjust slightly depending on flexibility and limb length. Make sure you're looking forward and up and ready to lead with your chest.
2. Weight on your feet;
Weight should be loaded over the mid foot just forward of your shin. Think about pushing your heel, big toe and little toe into the floor to create a good contact with the floor to drive through. A commonly misused coaching cue is "on your heels", the only thing that will happen when you load and drive through your heels is your hips will shoot up first leading to the dreaded "stripper snatch".
3. Knuckles down.
Turning your knuckles down will help keep the bar close to your body, imagine riding a motorbike and having a good grip of the handles with your wrists stacked in line with the knuckles. A lot of snatches fail because the weight of the bar pulls the athlete forward off the floor or the bar drives out instead up up past the hips. The bar should be close enough past the hips to pull your t-shirt up.
4. You gotta get tall before you get small !
We are all eager to get under the bar and catch that weight, that's where the end goal is! But what tends to happen a lot with people early on is making a good contact with the bar and dropping under immediately. Once contact is made with the bar we need to extend onto the toes and pull the bar higher! Now the bar is at its peak height, you can drop and punch under the bar.
5. Hips to bar.
I've left the most important tip for the end!
Once the bar passes the knee I see a lot of lifters dragging the bar up their thighs and into the hips, this is like trying to kick a football by throwing it at your foot, yes the ball will bounce off but it isn't what we are trying to achieve.
Past the knee's you need to be patient, stay over the bar and drive your hips through the bar. This gives the correct transfer of energy from your muscles to drive the bar over your head. We still want to keep the bar close, pinching the shoulders and squeezing the abdominal muscles but we must leave some room for our hips to drive forward.
Remember it's hips to bar, not bar to hips!