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Bar Path

Your Elbows Turn Out and the Bar Gets Away

Coaching by Danny Lehr with Matt Bruce1:47

The fault

Elbows rotating out during the pull, which lets the bar travel away from the body.

Why it happens

Elbow orientation decides bar path more than most lifters realize. Elbows pointed down and back let the bar swing; elbows pointed out to the ends of the bar keep it tracking up the body.

The fix

The 'knuckles down' cue from Matt Bruce. It produces a slight wrist curl that points the elbows toward the ends of the bar, adds a little triceps tension, and keeps the bar in.

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.

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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.

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Guest coach

Matt Bruce

Seven-time world team member and US national champion.

This fix was filmed with Matt Bruce. See every episode they appear in.

Snatch Clean Bar Path

About this fix

Originally published as "Knuckles Down feat. Matt Bruce", 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

Danny Lehr at The Lifting Fix, we have a special guest who's actually going to coach me. This is Matt Bruce. He is the head weightlifting coach for brute strength. He's also a set in time world team member for the US.

And so we're going to talk about just a real little kind of fix that we're going to do that really helps our pull. All right, so we'll be seeing a lot of times when people are pulling, they'll bend their arms. or their elbows are tracking behind them, which is incorrect. We want the elbows to be tracking towards the ends of the bar and also in order to have a premature arm bend.

The easiest thing for this is that cue your athletes to measure if nothing stays up or down and curl the bar. What that does is it turns the elbows towards the end of the bar, but it also engages the tri... up slightly keep the elbows have been prematurely okay so here put the body So let me show you the difference between if my knuckles are here, you'll see my elbow is pointed back towards the end of the bar. But immediately once I come here and turn my knuckle down, it automatically points that elbow towards the end.

So it allows me to finish keeping the bar up and close as Coach B. L. A. is telling us to do.

[BLANK_AUDIO] He'll grab his grip. The cue that I'm going to use is curl your wrist in or knuckles down and keep your knuckles down. A drill that I like to do to reinforce this is I'll have him do a pull, maybe he'll drop the knee or below the knee. Have him do a pull, really focusing on those knuckles being down.

And then I'll have him do a clean to get position. So granted, when somebody's got 200% input, they're not actually going to be able to curl the bar like this, right? It's just impossible. But then consciously thinking about that curl will keep the elbows pointed out towards the other bar and keep the bar close while the elbows--.

More bar path fixes

Your Snatch Is Inconsistent From the Power Position

Looping the bar and hitting a different position every rep.

Your Lats Are Not Engaged, So the Bar Swings Out

The bar drifts away from the body during the pull.

You Loop the Bar in the Snatch

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

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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