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The Jerk

You Tightrope Your Split Jerk

The fault

Landing with the feet on a single line front to back, with no width between them.

Why it happens

A split with no lateral base is unstable side to side, which is exactly where heavy jerks go wrong. You can be perfectly positioned front to back and still fall out of it.

The fix

Put something between the feet and practice the footwork against it. The feet learn to slide forward and back on two separate tracks rather than one.

About this fix
Originally published as "Feel a Balanced Jerk", part of The Lifting Fix, the free weekly technique series Danny Lehr started filming over a decade ago. He gave every episode away then, and they are still free here. Danny Lehr competed in Olympic weightlifting from 2010 to 2019 and won the 2019 Masters World Cup. More about Danny Lehr.
Transcript

Standing from The Lifting Fix and at CrossFit Excel and I have Jessica Bell, Jessica Bell helping me out. So we're working on her jerk for the first time together and she was having a problem where she was kind of tight roping her feet. So we're gonna see one of those. So go ahead and grab the bars, put it in the front rack, do a jerk.

So one thing center problem is her feet are kind of coming together so she was really kind of unstable having problems getting stable in that over-exposition. So you're going to recover and put the board in. So to teach her to keep those feet the same width, 'cause we know when you jerk, they should start here, they should just stay in the same spot. Like if you're on a motor track or on skis, your feet just kind of slide forward and backwards.

So I'm gonna teach that, 'cause we're gonna have her come off the platform You can stand and straddle this PVC pipe. Then from there, she just has her hands on her hips and she just does a jerk now. Good. Good.

And then recover. Step back, step up. One more time. Good, recover again.

Hands overhead. Good. And again. Good, alright so now she's gonna go back to the platform.

We're gonna leave the pipe here. If they're throwing you crazy with it, you can take it up there also, but you really wanna minimize any risk of actual injury, okay? So she knows what that's like to have the PVC there. She can think of that, she can pretend like it's there, she's had that experience.

So we're gonna take out as many moving parts as possible to keep things simple so we can-- work on what we want to focus on. So just going to grab the bar, go straight overhead with it, make sure it's behind your head. And from there, it's going to do a couple jerks. Go ahead.

Boom. Stay. And you'll notice in this one, it may not be the perfect jerk position. However, her feet are definitely that same weight.

She is no longer tight-run. All right? Grab your cover, step back up. now.

More jerk fixes

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You Miss Your Jerks Out Front

The bar finishes in front of the body and you chase it forward.

The Jerk1:32
With Noah Ohlsen

You Default to a Bad Catch Position Under Load

Technique that holds up in warm ups and reverts to something else when it gets heavy.

The Jerk2:02

Your Front Knee Lands Ahead of Your Foot

The front knee travels past the front foot on the catch.

The Jerk1:21

Want the rest of this category?

Every jerk fix I've filmed, one a day for five days, in the order I'd work through them with you. Not the order they got uploaded. The order that actually fixes it.

Plus the snatch pull checklist. One page, nine points, floor to hip.

Free, and these videos are free on this site whether you do this or not. This is just me putting them in the right order and sending them to you, so you don't have to guess where to start.

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