Good Olympic Lifters, Great Athletes.
Good Olympic Lifters, Great Athletes.
At MBSC we use the Hang Power Clean and Hang Power Snatch for the majority of our high school/college athletes. Athletes who suffer from back, shoulder or wrist pain or play contraindicated sports like baseball will use an alternative heavy implement power exercise (we’ll touch on those in tomorrow’s post).
The Hang Clean and Snatch are relatively safe exercises that do an incredible job of teaching athletes to create vertical force impulse. There are very few exercises that can replicate the power generated in the Olympic lifts. .
I also believe that the Olympic lifts do a great job of teaching “pulsing” how McGill speaks about it when discussing core training. The ability to create power, immediately relax and then stiffen again is a necessity for Olympic lifting. When athletes start with us they often lack the neurological sophistication required to complete the Oly lifts smoothly. With training they smooth out their ability to pop, relax and catch. This is a skill that’s invaluable for athletics.
We coach our athletes to be good Olympic lifters who are great athletes. Typically, we can coach an athlete to be proficient in a day or two and get them to be pretty damn good by the end of a 12 week session. With that said we don’t get overly entangled in the intricacies of Oly lifting when coaching our athletes. We want to see a good set up, a fast pull and a strong catch. Triple extension is great and we coach it but at the end of the day we want to see the bar move fast from point A to point B with a safe and stable catch position. When you’re training to develop a myriad of different qualities you cannot contribute the same amount of practice to the lifts as most Olympic lifting enthusiasts. We’ve found this time frame allows us to get all the benefits from Olympic lifting with a minimal time invested to it, leaving us more time to develop other qualities. This approach has paid dividends for us yielding significant increases in vertical jump and 10 yard sprint times in a majority of our athletes.