Snatching is one of the hardest and most technically demanding movements you can perform in a gym. Whether it’s in the sport of Weightlifting or for functional fitness, its rare that people pick it up easily and can perform efficient full snatches straight away. Like any skill it takes intentional practise through repetition to become proficient, it will not happen overnight. We’re not saying that these four points will instantly fix your snatch, as always, the most optimal way to improve is to find a coach that understands your limitations and can create individualised training structures to work on those weak areas. However, there are some issues we see frequently in uncoached athletes that can be easily addressed when working towards improving their snatch.
1. Stop maxing out.
This is number one because its what we see the most and became most prevalent with the rise in popularity of functional fitness. Individuals coming into the gym and loading the bar until they fail multiple times at their max weight. Then repeating every week. For the vast majority of the gym populace, strength is not the limiting factor in improving your max snatch. Therefore, the reason you keep failing the lift is through poor and inefficient movement patterns. These errors can be a multitude of different things. The human body is smart and will always try to leverage its strongest parts to move a barbell from point A to point B. When the weight is continuously increasing, the body will find any way to move the barbell which leads to some ugly looking snatches and athletes reaching their ‘ceiling’ pretty quickly. By dropping the load to submaximal levels, you give your body a chance to build strength in the proper positions required to perform the snatch effectively as well as the chance to focus on the technical aspects of the lift. When you’re at a beginner or even an intermediate level, stop thinking of the snatch as a strength movement and start thinking of it a skill that needs to be practised. However just snatching alone at submaximal levels isn’t going to fix everything, which leads us onto our next point…
2. Corrective exercises before full snatch
Corrective exercises are vastly underutilised by athletes. There is so many components of a full snatch that focusing on improving just one aspect during a full lift can be difficult. The purpose of a corrective exercise is to highlight and focus on a weak portion of the full snatch by performing a variation the helps the athlete ‘feel out’ and focus on the correct positioning required. For example, if an athlete continuously shoots their hips up in the first pull of a snatch, then performing snatch pulls beforehand where the athlete can focus on driving with the legs and keeping a constant torso angle will help ingrain the optimal positions of the hips, knees and back without having to worry about the rest of the lift. Then when they come to perform the full snatch, this motor pattern will have already been practised and will be much easier to implement in the full snatch. Taking weaknesses and isolating them provides a much better rate of improvement. Footballers don’t play a full practise match right before a league match, they complete specific drills that replicate a small fragment of the game, why should weightlifting be any different?
3. Don’t over cue
The Snatch takes under 2 seconds to complete, less than that if you’re a particularly speedy lifter. I think we can all agree in grand scheme of things 2 seconds is not much time. Therefore, asking your brain to process 3-4 cues during the 2 seconds in which you are performing the snatch is wholly unrealistic. You will see many athletes (and coaches) giving themselves 3 or 4 things to think about during the set up. The brain cannot process this many internal cues in the time given and often leads to an even worse lift due to overthinking. One cue is enough, possibly two if you are an experienced lifter. We use the Triage method to highlight the most important aspect that is in need of improvement, focus on that alone and fix it before moving on to the other error corrections. As mentioned above, this is where corrective exercises come in as they help the athlete learn the optimal positions to a point where they become natural. So, to conclude this point, focus on one cue at a time.
4. Spend time beforehand on mobility followed by loaded end ranges
Chances are unless you were blessed with the perfect anthropometrics, you would benefit for some increased mobility in the hips, ankles, shoulders or thoracic. Being able to get into a deeper overhead squat makes the snatch receiving position much easier and more comfortable. However, we fine mobility work is often part of a half-hearted cooldown where static stretches are performed purely out of mundane routine. Studies show that to benefit optimally from mobility work, they must be followed with loaded movements that require this new found range. When mobility work is performed in isolation or after a session it only provides a temporary improvement and much less of a permanent one. At UPC we have a ‘mobilisation, stabilisation, integration’ protocol that we implement before lifting to maximally benefit from mobility work. Mobilisation is implementing strategies to increase a desired joint range of motion, think active stretching. Stabilisation is utilising the range of motion gained by performing exercises that pass through it in an effort to layer on control in the new range. Finally integrating the new found range with loaded patterns in a similar/ section of the full movement you’re trying to improve (e.g in relation to improving hip mobility in the snatch, perform loaded overhead squats with pauses in the bottom). This helps strengthen the new found end range and helps create long term adaptations.
To reiterate we still believe the most effective way of improving your snatch is to find a competent coach that understands how to develop your weaknesses efficiently, but we guarantee that if you implement these four points consistently, your snatch technique and max numbers will improve.
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