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Off the Floor

Your Hips Shoot Up and Your Chest Drops

The fault

The hips rise faster than the bar and the chest collapses forward the instant the bar leaves the floor.

Why it happens

This is the most common fault in the whole sport, and it is almost never a leg strength problem. It happens when the athlete starts to stand up before the bar is ready to move, so the legs extend while the torso stays behind. The back angle opens early, the bar shifts forward, and every position after that is a recovery job.

The fix

Train the start as a position you hold, not a moment you rush through. Set the back angle, build tension against the bar before anything moves, and lift off slowly enough that the shoulders and hips travel at the same rate. The drill in the video teaches the athlete to feel that tension before the plates leave the ground.

About this fix
Originally published as "Lift Off", 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

Okay, welcome to The Lifting Fix, I'm Danny, I've got Buddy here, he's gonna help me out. So one problem that's common is when people go to snatch more clean, their hips shoot up too soon instead of maintaining that good back angle. Alright, so let's go ahead and show that a bad example. So he gets set in a good start position, but he drops his chest, oh, comes off the floor.

A lot of times people just don't know what that good floor position should feel like. And so if we just have them pull the bar an inch off the ground, that's not really that true floor position either. But what we can do, again that's kind of a weird place to be, what we can do is if we elevate him a little bit, then he can actually feel what that floor position should feel like. feel like.

So we can use a little piece of wood that's also a common fat as well as rubber mat like there's one back here. you know, in fact we can even stack them up if we want but, point. So he's just gonna stand on that wood now and he's gonna first go through positions and then lower it down so he knows where it is. So somebody's gonna watch him and help him to make sure he doesn't pull too far.

So go ahead and just bear that ground good, now to the knee, now to the hip, and now just lower back down. to where it should be and keep going down and hold right there and now that is a true position. He feels how he needs to be tight and then go ahead and snatch him there. So if someone has that problem, they're hit, shootin' up off the ground to fix it, they just need to feel how to be tense and feel what that good floor position is.

All right, elevate their feet so that way they can levitate, make the bar levitate, right? - Oh, that's not, I'm probably gonna make it. - That's exactly how you say it. - That's exactly how you say it.

So you can hold the bar there and they know how to be tight, run off the floor. for a good snatch. Thank you buddy. Thanks Sabrina.

More off the floor fixes

See all

Your Back Lights Up When You Lower the Bar

Pain or a hot, fatigued low back on the way down rather than on the way up.

Off the Floor2:18

Your Hips Rise Before Your Shoulders

Off the floor the hips shoot up first and the shoulders lag behind.

Off the Floor2:31

Your Upper Back Is Loose at the Setup

No tightness through the upper back before the bar leaves the ground.

Off the Floor1:54

Want the rest of this category?

Every fix I've filmed for what happens off the floor, 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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