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The Jerk

You Are Slow and Tentative Under the Jerk

Coaching by Danny Lehr with Ursula Papandrea1:18

The fault

Hesitating on the way under the bar.

Why it happens

Speed under the jerk is partly mechanical and partly nerve. A lifter who does not trust the catch will not commit to getting under, and that hesitation reads as slowness.

The fix

Ursula Papandrea's drill for speed and courage under the jerk. Filmed at North River CrossFit in Chicago.

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

Ursula Papandrea

This fix was filmed with Ursula Papandrea. See every episode they appear in.

About this fix

Originally published as "Speed Under Your 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

So we're going to do one of the bad jerks. Here we go. So he's forward to see, he's kind of high in his head, so he's kind of like a joker. And so how are we going to fix that?

We're going to use a drill, a drill that we learned from Ursula at the next barbell, to shoot how to do clean jerks. We call it clean jerks. So he's going to do a full clean off the ground, and as he stands up with the clean, he's going to go straight into the jerk. So what that does is as you build up to a heavier weight, like say 80 to 85 percent of max miniature, you really feel that the head heat can feel kind of slow in the finish, so it forces you to get under the bar more.

teach them to see under the bar and also teach them to drive the bar behind your head. So let's see if you can do those clean jerks. Here we go. So what you can see that as a queen jerk, he has to drive far back and also as the weight would increase, it would force him to get one more lap faster.

So speed on the part of the jerk, as long as the queen jerks take out the claws and the queen straight to the jerk. Thank you very much. And also thank you to River North CrossFit here in Chicago.

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.

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