Feet Spinning in the Snatch or Clean
If your feet spin during the pull of the snatch or clean, listen up:
Stand on one leg and try to spin your foot—the only way to do it is to shift to the heel or balls of the foot, or to release pressure by unweighting yourself momentarily.
If you’re pushing continuously into the floor and through the whole foot evenly as you pull, your foot is stuck to the floor and can’t spin.
So if your feet are spinning, you need to first focus on remaining evenly balanced over the whole foot.
Next, never let up on the push into the floor—keep driving continuously into the final upward acceleration rather than backing off momentarily as you transition into it.
If your feet are fighting to spin out to an extreme degree, you have some work to do on hip mobility and stability in addition to the points in this video.
If you’re trying to pull with your toes straight forward, your body is begging you to quit it by spinning them out.
If want to pull with your toes straight forward because you’ve heard it creates “hip torque” or something, spend some time watching the best lifters in the world, and you’ll find it’s very rare. This is not because these lifters and their coaches haven’t yet figured out this special performance secret…
It’s possible for straight forward feet to be the best thing for certain athletes, but typically it’s because of anatomical peculiarities like being pigeon-toed or approaching it.
You do have to find what works best for you, and that may very well not be what’s conventional. But experimenting and finding that you are in fact an anomaly is very different from just blindly adopting something unconventional based on your love of a certain lifter, or a social media influencer’s click-baity recommendation.
Stand on one leg and try to spin your foot—the only way to do it is to shift to the heel or balls of the foot, or to release pressure by unweighting yourself momentarily.
If you’re pushing continuously into the floor and through the whole foot evenly as you pull, your foot is stuck to the floor and can’t spin.
So if your feet are spinning, you need to first focus on remaining evenly balanced over the whole foot.
Next, never let up on the push into the floor—keep driving continuously into the final upward acceleration rather than backing off momentarily as you transition into it.
If your feet are fighting to spin out to an extreme degree, you have some work to do on hip mobility and stability in addition to the points in this video.
If you’re trying to pull with your toes straight forward, your body is begging you to quit it by spinning them out.
If want to pull with your toes straight forward because you’ve heard it creates “hip torque” or something, spend some time watching the best lifters in the world, and you’ll find it’s very rare. This is not because these lifters and their coaches haven’t yet figured out this special performance secret…
It’s possible for straight forward feet to be the best thing for certain athletes, but typically it’s because of anatomical peculiarities like being pigeon-toed or approaching it.
You do have to find what works best for you, and that may very well not be what’s conventional. But experimenting and finding that you are in fact an anomaly is very different from just blindly adopting something unconventional based on your love of a certain lifter, or a social media influencer’s click-baity recommendation.
