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The Jerk

You Land With Soft, Unlocked Arms

Coaching by Danny Lehr1:03

The fault

Receiving the jerk with arms that are not quite locked out.

Why it happens

A jerk caught on soft arms is a press waiting to happen, and the press usually loses. The lockout has to be there on arrival, not established afterward.

The fix

A handful of light jerks starting with the bar already locked out overhead. It teaches the arms to be locked at the moment the load arrives.

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.

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About this fix

Originally published as "How to Have Solid Arms in the 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

I'm Danny Lehr here at The Lifting Fix where I cross-fit Excel. I'm Leslie Whitfie. Talk about jerks, man. I tell them the problem people can do is they land and they're kind of soft.

They don't land locked out. So do a bad example of a jerk like that. and see her elbows are kind of bent and kind of soft in there and go to her camera. She doesn't understand what it's like to be tight and locked out when she lands, okay?

But that's a common problem people have. So how we're gonna fix that or drill her work on that, we're just gonna start with the bar already locked out. So you do push press, you're gonna need to get over her head and then while the bar is already locked out, her elbows are tight. from there she's just going to do it here.

Good. And the cover and leave it up there and do one more. Good, and recover. Very good.

So what this drill is doing is it's teaching you what it feels like to be locked out and solid when your feet land on the ground, alright? So if you know someone who has soft elbows, alright make sure you are a part of this. If they know how they can fix that problem, land nice and tight.

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.

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