The Theory of Good Weightlifting Technique
By J. Austin McCubbin
The article title is by nature contentious. I caution against calling certain styles or techniques "right or wrong," versus "good or bad." I argue that good weightlifting technique shares three fundamental principles:
- It is efficient
- It is safe
- It is effective for the individual athlete
Efficiency
If someone is way off balance, banging the bar into their hips and introducing excessive horizontal movement in the bar path, or doing any of a number of things in a manner that is inefficient according to general physics, then it's not good technique.
Turn this around -- if you have a great bar path that stays within your area of base (think ankles to balls of your feet), your explosion from the power position exerts nominal upward force on the bar, and you receive the bar balanced and in control, you're demonstrating good technique.
Our example for this article is going to be a commonly taught style in certain gyms who specialize in the "sport of fitness." Don't get me wrong, that's where I started. But I had to work for a long time to drill out bad muscle memory from cues coaches were giving me who had no actual training to coach the Olympic lifts.
The most common problem in these gyms -- particularly in how they teach the snatch -- is to pull the bar up and bang your hips into it, swinging it around in an arc as you drop to receive it overhead (snatch). This is often mistakenly called the Catapult Style, it is not. Don McCauley originated the term, before people ran away with it in the wrong direction.
The inefficiency here is in the bar trajectory. What are we trying to do? Pull the bar up high enough for us to then pull down underneath. If we can't pull it high enough, no bueno. A bar path focusing on an upward trajectory is maximizing vertical -- not horizontal -- force, more easily accomplishing the task.
Snatch bar paths that look more like a hard "R", where the bar comes in, and then rapidly loops out, simply do not maximize vertical force and bleed energy and force for excessive horizontal displacement.
Safety
Weightlifting is an incredibly safe sport, but it requires that you respect the barbell, don't be an idiot, and use technique that isn't putting you unnecessarily at risk of injury.
Fundamentally, if you're feeling in control of your lift, it's most likely safe. Excessive horizontal displacement introduces unnecessary issues that increase your risk of injury.
Let's talk about your area of base. Generally, this is your feet, but most importantly, it is between the balls of your feet (or knuckles of your feet) and your ankle. The pull from the floor begins with the bar over the feet's knuckles, and it comes inward towards the lifter after he or she initiates the lift. Draw a vertical line from the knuckles of your feet -- the bar should never pass back in front of this line. To do so means the excessive horizontal movement has placed the bar outside your area of base.
In physics, when the center of gravity (or for lifters, the combined center of gravity) moves outside the area of base, the object will fall over. The higher the barbell's weight is in relation to your body weight, the more the bar effects your combined center of gravity, and the far more important this concept is.
If you are using a technique that emphasizes looping the bar out and around, the bar exits your area of base. Unless you perfectly catch the bar with your feet in their original plane, you're going to have to jump forward or backwards to position your area of base under the bar's landing position.
The idea of jumping forward or backward excessively to make up for bad technique is dangerous on its own. What's worse, there is excessive shoulder strain when your shoulders are responsible for stopping a bar that is moving down and horizontally towards the rear. Shoulder injuries are far riskier with this style.
Effective for the Individual
Weightlifting is a sport. What good is technique that has high miss rates at weight that someone should be able to lift? Are you recording a lot of misses at 75%-85% of your training max? That's ineffective.
As we discussed with area of base and combined center of gravity, the idea of jumping forward or backward and then attempting to stop horizontal movement with your shoulders leads to a high amount of misses. Most commonly, a lifter won't get far forward enough and loses the bar in front of them, or the horizontal movement puts the lifter back on their heals, straining the shoulder, and eventually losing the lift behind them.
One caveat on this point though: traditional or standard training techniques have to allow for individual variance. Not everyone is the same. Biomechanics are a big issue, so one lifter may look radically different from another. I'm a 6'5" guy whose legs are 1.75 the length of his torso (elite lifters are more like a 1.1 leg:torso ratio and short), so I look like I'm a table when I'm pulling a snatch from the floor. As such, coaches who don't know what they're talking about often tell me to get my chest more upright, which then compromises the far more important fundamentals in the startup.
Conclusions
While styles and individual body types vary, these principles should translate to any technique taught by a competent coach. If you are a member of a gym that isn't focused on weightlifting but that includes it as a movement, beware the advice they give. Ask if it sounds safe, efficient and effective to you. And don't be ashamed to scale in metcons that use high volume reps of high skill-cap movements. Be safe.
For weightlifting enthusiasts who scour the Internet and Youtube for technique videos, just beware the amount of poor information available. Don't buy into simple tricks. Don't try and emulate the flashy dynamic starts that you saw a guy do when he set a record -- the repeatability of the exact same start position is difficult enough, so there's no need to go there if you're still seeing inconsistency in your pulls.
In the end, lift safely, effectively and efficiently, and put in the work it takes to improve.