Home / The Jerk / You Are Not Punching Under the Bar

The Jerk

You Are Not Punching Under the Bar

Coaching by Danny Lehr1:35

The fault

Pressing the bar up rather than driving yourself down under it.

Why it happens

At heavy weights the bar stops going up on its own and you have to go get it. Lifters who never learned to punch under will always be limited by how much they can press out.

The fix

Tall jerks. They remove the leg drive entirely so the only thing left is using the arms to move yourself under the bar.

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.

$49 once. Lifetime access. Downloadable.

Get the course Watch module one free

A full year to change your mind. Keep the course either way.

About this fix

Originally published as "Tall Jerks", 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 a jerk drill and this is going to be for everybody. It's called tall jerks, but specifically, pretty much following the barbell wall, you have some jerk drills and this is something that's a great warm up for that. So, in the jerk, a lot of times people think when they mess up if their split is wrong or their dip drive is wrong and those things may be... But a big part is you to understand the role of the arms in the jerk.

People know, say, punch yourself under, drive under the bar, but how do you feel that? And a way to feel that is with tall jerks. So Aaron's going to grab the bar. and he's going to bring it up and he's going to go all the way up on his toes.

So it would be like the end of his drive. From there he's going to drop into a split and catch it. So go. Very good.

Let's do one more. Slow it down so like the end of his drive. From there he just pulls into a split. Good.

So it's a great drill for timing, working on feet, hitting, being long. It's also a great drill for learning how to use your arm. And then, as you can see, we've got a lot of different types of bar pads. Very good.

And then ideally you put a little bit of weight on the bar. It's not going to be anything super heavy. You put just a little bit of weight, so you have to kind of use those arms a little bit. All right?

It's all jerks. Great jerky drill. Learn to punch onto the bar.

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.

Or just download the checklist, no email needed.