Help with Overhead Squats and Snatches?
The simple answer for help with better Overhead Squats and Snatches is repetition. Repetition, repetition, repetition is key. So constant exposure to that stimulus. That’s why our athletes do muscle snatch and overhead squats as a warmup in a specific sequence before every workout and our general athletes in our elite program train four days a week. As part of the standard warmup, they have to go through a sequence of muscle snatch and overhead squat. That is going to increase their mobility, suppleness, core stability, and their ankles, knees, hips, thoracic spine, shoulder girdle.
Some of the athletes get so proficient that they can do muscle snatch and overhead squat—all working all the way up to about 90 kgs. But for our basic mobility is we get our athletes to start from the bar, which is 20 kgs, and work up to 40 kgs, which is 88 lbs. So that’s our basic standards.
Our Female, they’ll work with a female bar, which is 35 lbs, and work up to 35 kgs, which is a standard female. We don’t care how small you are and your body weight and so on and so forth. That’s what we do. We just work. We get our females and our males ascent to work up to those basic standards. What that does is basically sneak in mobility, flexibility, and stability. We adhere to the mother of all learning—repetition.
So if you understand the mother of all learning is repetition, you expose your athletes to those lifts or warmups as frequently as possible. Same thing with a snatch, our athletes snatch in the elite program four times a week, whether it’s power snatch or a full snatch. So again, this adheres to the basic principle—the mother of all learning. You will acquire proficient technique and mobility, flexibility, and suppleness.
The biggest thing is technique is paramount. That means there is no excessive loading on improper technique.
What happens is we see this over and over in a lot of my advanced athletes who’ve been with me forever will adhere to this or laugh at this. A new guy comes, not girls, they only have that big of an ego, but new guys come in and they might be seeing like 150 lbs hockey player or a hundred moving some big weight fast, looking explosive. And this guy might be 220 lbs jack and he can’t move as explosive or move as efficiently as this lighter guy or a smaller guy or they might be seeing a girl moving some big weight in a snatch, explosively and fast.
So what they want to do is speed up the process. They want to put more weight on the bar ’cause they’re feeling embarrassed. Happens all the time. I see it. I see it all the time, but they have to just be patient take their time because usually the limiting factor is obviously coordination, timing, mobility, and flexibility, and suppleness. Those have to be ingrained before you start applying weight. If you don’t, you’re going to get hurt. That’s what happens a lot.
People start rushing to putting on load then they can’t, they cannot utilize that load correctly and they get hurt. So within us, one of the biggest jobs that we have to do as coaches is actually tell the athletes, No, take that off, take that off. Go down, use the bar, unload, take that off. Over and over and over, and when you turn your back, they’re trying to sneak on more weight because they see this 150 lbs little girl just smoking some big weights over there, and men don’t deal with that very well. Right? It’s a natural thing. I get it. But the biggest thing to work on your mobility, flexibility, and coordination is repetition. Adhere to technique is paramount, that means do not load weight on improper technique.
You’re not an Olympic lifter. Okay? If you’re not an Olympic lifter, you don’t need to put on big weight because what’s happening utilizing all this lightweight building profession technique is that you are building power, high-velocity power, right? That is the biggest thing that people don’t understand.
I get the athletes to move lightweight extremely fast so they get extremely powerful and they wonder why they’re getting powerful because the trick is that they’re exposed to this high-velocity work very frequently. So because they’re getting exposed to as high-velocity work very frequently, they start expressing tremendous amounts of power in their sport: throwing, hitting, sprinting, jumping, and so on and so forth.
To answer that question—how do you work on better overhead position, better snatches—is the mother of all is repetitions. If you have issues in terms of certain orthopedic issues, obviously you have to go get that checked out and so on and so forth. But for me, commonly, I’ve seen guys come in here and they can’t even put a stick over their head properly.
So we work for mistake, raised their heels over a period of time. They start using the bar, sitting into a full squat, doing muscle snatch, overheads properly ’till they’re working with the basic standards. So it’s just repetition, repetition, repetition. Don’t get frustrated, take your time, be patient and everything will fall into place.
Sometimes it’s just like magic or the boom. You just turn around and like, Woo! Where’d you come from? A lot of times I laugh because they can’t believe like, wow. You just have to be patient and you just have to stick with it.
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