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Bar Path

The Bar Gets Away From You in the Third Pull

The fault

Losing contact with the bar as you go under it.

Why it happens

The third pull is where most lifters stop pulling and start hoping. If the bar drifts even a few inches from the body on the way under, you are catching a weight that is already in front of your base.

The fix

High pulls, done correctly. The value only shows up if you keep the bar in tight through the top rather than letting the elbows swing wide, which is what most people actually do with them.

About this fix
Originally published as "Keep it Close...Or Else!", 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

I'm Danny Lehr and I have Buddy here helping me out. So what we're going to talk about today is a way to help people to learn to keep the bar close on their pole. So it happens at times when people are working on high poles in the stash or in the clean as well, they kind of tend to shoot the bar out away from their body or they come in and they try to keep their... elbows high and outside but they don't know what it's like to actually keep the bar close.

So you can tell like keep it close, elbows high and outside and sometimes they still struggle with that. So do a couple bad ones so you can see that bar floating away from you a little bit. [BLANK Oh no! Okay, again, again.

So it's coming out. So I'm telling them to keep those elbows high outside and then what I can do to help with that, very simple, is just a little constraint-based training. I can do a lot of things. So I just grab a TPC pipe, I'm going to put my hand down below just in case she does come into it.

And then all right, now go ahead and lower the bar and do a high pull. There we go. And so he knows he does not want to hit the pipe. And then what I can even do if he continues to be successful, I can get a little bit closer to him.

Alright, and that way he kind of knows also how close he needs to be. If he does throw it out, he'll just hit the pipe. Oh, there we go, a little tap there, now he knows. Oh, now he knows, I gotta keep it closer.

Now go ahead again. So if you have an athlete or if you yourself are struggling with throwing the bar away, just set a PVC pipe up there and help you out. If you don't have a friend to hold it for you or they don't trust you, think you might hit them. You could even.

something to hold the PVC pipe sticking in there. A few more weights get a little higher but that'll do the trick also and it'll kind of hold it up for you there. Alright, thank you very much.

More bar path fixes

See all

Your Snatch Is Inconsistent From the Power Position

Looping the bar and hitting a different position every rep.

Bar Path1:23

Your Lats Are Not Engaged, So the Bar Swings Out

The bar drifts away from the body during the pull.

Bar Path1:40

You Loop the Bar in the Snatch

The bar swings out in an arc at the top instead of staying against the body.

Bar Path1:41

Want the rest of this category?

Every bar path 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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