Lifting Without Lifting - The BreakThrough

To become the fast and vicious Olympic Lifter you want to be, you have to lift without lifting. This is not a zen-like approach of using your mind to Snatch all the weight, it is learning to pull or push yourself under the bar instead of trying to lift it up to you. It is the giving up on the idea that you have had since the first time you picked up a barbell – that you must lift it – all the time.

Starfish Feet – OverPuller – doesn’t like to lose any tension on the barbell.

Painfully Slow and Forward Jerk – OverPusher – wants to press up on the barbell when they should push themselves lower underneath it.

The tipping point when a lifter goes from kind of decent to F$CK that guy or gal can move weight generally happens when the transition between the 2^nd and 3^rd pull starts to stick.

Let’s take Mino my opponent for example, when I first saw him lift, I thought one thing – bull-like football player, no skill. He could rip 265 pounds off the ground and Power Snatch it over his head. Let’s not even discuss his Power Clean, that will make him angry.

• A tell-tale sign that this is a problem is the Power lifts are significantly more than the athlete’s Full Lifts.

Mino’s Power Snatch was not smooth, it was rough like a bull dozer hitting a guard rail. There were some other technical faults but the main cause of a lot of those problems was that he couldn’t ever stop pulling on the barbell. He loved that son of a bitch and he was going to let it know.

We (mostly Coach Davis) had to convince Mino to go back to square one. That it would be worth taking 8 steps backwards to go 11 steps forward. Mino stepped into a ton of technique work, a lot of it rebuilding the lifts from the power position down, retraining his mind and body to become OK with this odd transition of no longer pulling the barbell vertical. He took it on relentlessly and as you will see in a few weeks I would not be surprised to see the TrainAdaptEvolve GoldenBoy Snatch 300 pounds inside of three months.