not the picture I would have used lol but great thread
On March 17 2012 22:17 ZerG~LegenD wrote: Has anyone else had problems with banging the bar into their balls while cleaning? I'm trying to learn the OLs but this is highly demotivating.
So I was just revisiting this thread and I know I've looked at that picture for the clean before but I just noticed it appears he gives himself a little tap with the bar there xD
I did cleans today for the first time in forever. My forms gone to shit. Barely any hip drive and I'm having trouble getting my elbows up for rack position. I need to go through and rewatch all the tutorials and do some MWOD.
Just a quick question. In the rack position where exactly does the bar rest. I know it's on the deltoids but is it towards the neck (or even touching the neck?) or more towards the middle of the muscle? When doing front squats the bar inevitably ends up touching my neck.
@Ludrik, I think it depends heavily on the person. I find that it works best when the bar is just slightly infront of my collarbone. This could probably change depending on your deltoid size, arm length and flexibility.
so my wrist has been hurting when i squat. i'm not sure if this is a lack of flexibility (can't get my arms back enough?) or I'm not high enough on the bar? will re-read that section on squatting in starting strength and figure out what i'm doing wrong.
Take what you will from this but it looks like you're well on your way to learning a proper low-bar squat as starting strength advocates. I like how you initiate your squat with your hips and not your knees. The few things that I'm seeing that can be improved are 1. keeping your chest up and 2. as you say, keeping your knees back.
It's natural to have a bit of forward lean doing a low-bar squat but it's definitely not beneficial in anyway for your chest to dip down at anytime in the squat. Are you maintaining tight abdominals throughout the squat? Or are you consciously trying to bring that chest up?
The next thing is your knees shooting forward. The best I can do for that is to tell you to sit back some more. I can't tell if it's the camera angle or if it's actually happening but it seems like as you squat down, the bar travels forward and past your center of gravity. That could explain why your left heel comes up. Really focus on bringing your "butt out".
Maybe consider reposting this in the main health and fitness thread if you need a quicker response for anything else. I feel like you'd get more help there since Olympic lifters tend to squat high-bar.
thanks a lot man, no I am not and never have maintained tight abs while squatting. actually that is a weakness for my bench as well, I do not tighten up all over like I should. will definitely attempt to remedy this next day i am lifting. i lift my chest @ the top of the lift, should I be lifting it as I am going down? thanks again for your comments I am rather new at this and really want to improve my form for safety reasons
Umm, as far as I know, the chest should be kept up to the best of your ability from the moment you unrack to the moment you finish and rack it again. I don't see any benefits from letting it dip at any point because logically, as the bar gets heavier and heavier, if you let your chest dip down, it's only a matter of time before it's too heavy for you to force back up as you've lost that important tightness. Think of it like unracking a bench press, if you unrack it locked out, the bar won't come down on you, but if you unrack it with your elbows bent, it's much harder to fight the bar from coming down.
And no worries, I'm more than glad to help people when I can as a form of giving back to this forum.
@TheGeneralTheoryOf: The bar needs to be over the middle of your foot at all times. Try to achieve that (there's more than one way to do it) and your squat will get a lot better. It could turn out that you have underlying issues such as flexibility that you'll have to work on.
knees too far forward are hurting my depth & my left heel lifts a bit
You're dropping your chest way too much. I've found that most of the time this is caused by your subconscious associating bar height with squat depth. Squatting in front of a mirror exacerbates the problem. Your chest should lower during the squat, but only to keep the bar over the center of your foot. When you focus on bar height and not hip movement, you end up dropping your chest farther than you should, which puts the bar forward, past the center of your foot and forces your weight to your toes.
Also, your hips do not come down uniformly. It seems as though your legs are moving independently. I'm not sure what is causing this but it is obvious if you watch you butt for the full squat.
Your weight does shift to your toes as well, but this is caused by the lowering of your chest, which creates a non-vertical barpath. If you fix that and what ever is going on with your hips not working in synch you should be good to go.
You're also just hitting parallel on a couple reps, and a bit high on a few others. This should fix itself once you get a better feel for what your body is doing and can feel your hip height during reps.
On the topic of your wrists, try keeping your wrists straight and focus on pushing the bar into you back, and not holding the bar with your hands. I have 0 vertical force on the bar with my hands when I squat and I have 0 wrist pain as well. Your hands are only there to keep the bar on your back.
Gahhhhhhh, stupid little things keeping me from snatching heavier. I had a particularly good day today and attempted to snatch 70kg twice but failed both of them behind me. I have uploaded the first one and will get to doing the second one later.
In the first one, I noticed that I jumped forward and that would have made the bar land behind me a bit but my untrained eyes tell me no more =[ Can I please get some help identifying what else I could improve on?
(lift doesn't actually occur until 0:40, I didn't have time to edit out the beginning)
(lift at 0:50 - video should be processing right now but should be done soon)
EPT![[image loading]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2529/4122764619_ff5d16507f_o.jpg)
