Finish the Pull After Contact
A pretty common mistake in the snatch or clean is to quit pulling when you feel the bar contact.
Either consciously or not, you associate that contact with complete extension and start pulling under in reaction to it.
But the bar contacts when the trunk is vertical and the knees are bent and forward.
This is nowhere near the end of the pull—there’s still a lot of productive leg drive and hip extension remaining.
Think about bar contact as the bar moving up your body as you extend, rather than as a brief single point of contact—like you’re using your legs to PUSH the bar up your body.
In other words, the bar comes into contact and then slides up your body as you continue extending.
To head off the predictable comment on this one, I’m not telling you to pull too long—I’m telling you that you need to pull enough.
And no, when I say slide up the body, I don’t mean dragging it so hard you’re exfoliating or trying to push it into your skeleton… I mean light continuous contact as it moves up rather than bouncing off a single point.
Either consciously or not, you associate that contact with complete extension and start pulling under in reaction to it.
But the bar contacts when the trunk is vertical and the knees are bent and forward.
This is nowhere near the end of the pull—there’s still a lot of productive leg drive and hip extension remaining.
Think about bar contact as the bar moving up your body as you extend, rather than as a brief single point of contact—like you’re using your legs to PUSH the bar up your body.
In other words, the bar comes into contact and then slides up your body as you continue extending.
To head off the predictable comment on this one, I’m not telling you to pull too long—I’m telling you that you need to pull enough.
And no, when I say slide up the body, I don’t mean dragging it so hard you’re exfoliating or trying to push it into your skeleton… I mean light continuous contact as it moves up rather than bouncing off a single point.
