Episode 7 – How To Snatch, Part 1: Catch It And Ride It Down

[Video below]

This is the first of three episodes of Samurai Strength on how to snatch. See Part 2 here.

The way I teach the snatch is by using what you could call the “key frames” concept.

In computer animation, you don’t bother drawing out every single frame. You draw only the most important frames, the ones that represent the movement of your characters the most.

I wrote an article over at Breaking Muscle a while ago on How to Power Clean using this concept and wrote the following:

I used to have a lot of fun messing around with computer animation programs. In those programs you can quickly create a moving image by only drawing 2 or 3 frames. In animation they call these “key frames”. You tell the computer the most important positions you want your character to be in during your “movie” and the program will do the work of drawing all the intermediate steps for you.

Key Frame Bias

If you pick the WRONG keyframes then you end up with the wrong story, or at the very least movements that look weirdly unnatural. For instance, look again at those two frames of the Garfield comic above. If all you saw was those, then your impression would likely be that Garfield is just up to his usual “no good”.

But, take a look at the full comic below. In this one it becomes clear that Garfield was just having fun, licking his pop, and got stuck. His owner gave him a rather smug look, and Garfield was simply responding the way a cat would.

The point is that picking the right keyframes DEFINES your story – and your snatch.

So, you’d better pick the right ones!

In the book, Samurai Strength, and in many articles around the web I’ve outlined what those Keyframes are. But, today you’re going to go to Step Two. You are now going to become the animation program and fill in the blanks between the keyframes.

Episode 7 Summary

In this first of three episodes teaching you how to move from one position (keyframe) to the next in the snatch we’re going to focus on the most important one: going from the Hip Position to the Catch Position.

The most important thing to be sure of is that you start and end in the right positions! That may seem obvious, but it isn’t for your body. Start out in the perfect Hip Position (shoulders behind the bar, weight on the heels, legs in quarter squat position, chest up nice and high, etc), and end in the right Catch Position (legs right back in a quarter squat, arms locked, head forward, shrug up, etc).

To get the bar above your head you’ve GOT to use your legs NOT your arms. Again, this might seem obvious, but nearly everyone screws this up at first.

Whenever I teach someone to snatch the very first thing I have them do after practicing holding the position at the hip is to “jump” the bar over their head … inevitably they curl the bar over their head. To be fair, it’s not a bar, it’s a PVC pipe. But, we adults find it hard at first to honestly use the legs and hips as our prime movers for almost anything, let alone for something this complicated.

To get this point across I default quite a bit to the old snatch lie and tell them to jump. An Olympic lift is NOT a jump. But, it is closer to being a jump than a curl!

The last point in the video is a big one, as it is essentially what makes this a drill.

On every lift, I want you to “Catch it and Ride it Down”. What I mean by that is that you are going to catch the bar in a (roughly) quarter squat position (remember, we’re using light weights here – even just a stick), STOP exactly where you are, and then squat down fully.

Do NOT catch it at the quarter squat, stand, adjust yourself, THEN squat down. That is wrong.

1. Catch it
2. STOP
3. Ride it Down

OK … enough blabbing. Here’s the video (where I do more blabbing!)

(Hat Tip: Jack Cheng)

GO TO PART 2

 

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