Home / The Jerk / You Miss Jerks From Poor Overhead Stability

The Jerk

You Miss Jerks From Poor Overhead Stability

Coaching by Danny Lehr1:17

The fault

The jerk gets overhead and then falls apart.

Why it happens

The instability could be in the shoulders, the elbows or the midline. Chasing each one separately takes a long time, and most lifters guess wrong about which one it is.

The fix

The jerk recovery. It addresses all three potential causes at once, which makes it a good default when you cannot tell where the leak is.

That's one fault. There are sixty-four.

The free fixes assume you already know roughly what you're doing and something specific is going wrong. Find it, fix it, get back to training. That's what they're for and they'll always be here.

The course is the other direction. It goes in order: the positions, how you move through them, the finish and the catch, then the faults that come out of each one. It's what I'd teach you from scratch, filmed properly instead of on a phone in the corner of a gym.

Thirteen modules in 1080p, plus a 16 page written companion you can read at the gym instead of watching.

Taught by Danny Lehr. Competed in Olympic weightlifting 2010 to 2019, won the 2019 Masters World Cup. Coached these lifts under Glenn Pendlay and Dave Spitz.

$49 once. Lifetime access. Downloadable.

Get the course Watch module one free

A full year to change your mind. Keep the course either way.

About this fix

Originally published as "Jerk Stability", 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

Well, if you're The Lifting Fix, I'm Danny Lehr here at CrossFit Excel. I've got Aaron who's going to help me out. So Aaron had a little shoulder issue and it's just a little unstable. It's all healthy now and good to go.

Because he's catching his jerk. It's a little wobbly and as you're covering sometimes he'll lose that. So one way to help that out and help that stability is through something called jerk recovery. So he set up a high rack that's going to be in a split, it's going to be completely locked out.

So he's going to get that, kind of get that into a split. And then from here, he completely locked out where he needs to be. He's tight in his upper back where he needs to be. Everything's solid and locked in, okay?

From there, he's just gonna barely break the bar off and then step back, step up into jerk recovery. And then again, go into split. And then just like coming from the jerk, step back, step up. There we go.

And what that will do is it will help build that stability in the joint and it's really teaching people to lock out. So if someone has a problem being soft and not locking out the jerks, another drill can help. And also this is something you can really build the weight up on. It's not uncommon you can do over 100%, maybe 105, maybe 110%, or your max clean and jerk, or your max jerk.

on his jerker covers. Get stable overhead.

More jerk fixes

You Miss Your Jerks Out Front

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

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.

Your Front Knee Lands Ahead of Your Foot

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

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.

Or just download the checklist, no email needed.