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Bar Path

You Get Behind the Bar Too Early

Coaching by Danny Lehr1:26

The fault

The torso comes upright before the bar reaches the hip.

Why it happens

Staying over the bar keeps the load on the legs and back for longer. Standing up early hands the lift to the arms and the lower back before the bar has any speed.

The fix

Add a pause exactly where the position is being missed. Pull, hold two or three seconds at the hip, then finish. The pause makes the athlete live in the position they have been skipping.

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.

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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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Snatch Bar Path

About this fix

Originally published as "How to Stay Over the Bar", 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

Hey everybody, the The Lifting Fix here. We're going to talk about a problem with snatch. Sometimes people do not stay over the bar the way they should. So they go to snatch, they really tend to get behind the bar really early, which causes some problems.

Usually the hips come out too much and the bar is looping. So you really want to stay over the bar as long as you can. Alright, so the way to fix that is we're going to do... drill where first he's going to snatch and he's going to pause at the hip.

Now when he's paused there, we're going to check to make sure he's over the bar as he should be. So he's either going to be slightly bent, but his shoulders need to be on top of the bar, not behind him. All right? We're going to pause over two seconds and continue in the snatch, then do one snap from the ground.

All right? without the pause. So go ahead and demonstrate. So I'm going to pull and I'll catch two-thurn.

One, two, empty. Okay? And then you just go to one step. one from the ground and making sure to stay over the bar.

So. something that's often overlooked, some people would consider it an American problem, but the easy way to fix that, stay over the bar, pause the hit, finish, and then a snatch. Stay over as long as you can, really helps that leverage.

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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