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Believe it or not, I hate writing about weightlifting technique. No matter what you say, somebody is going to disagree or challenge it. Even if you write one of the most basic, universally understood ideas in weightlifting, it’ll still get second-guessed by some keyboard legend. I could write "To win weightlifting competitions, you have to lift more weight than your competitors" and some numbnuts would tell me I was wrong. This gets annoying.

But I'm gonna write about technique anyway, because I refuse to be held hostage by a bunch of toolbags.

So…about this whole "pull slowly from the floor" thing.

Most of the people I'm working with these days have already learned the OLifts somewhere else before I start with them. And I'm seeing some of the same technique problems over and over and over and over.

One of the biggest ones is a painfully slow first pull (from the floor to the knees). Many athletes seem to think that you're supposed to intentionally use a slow movement during this phase of the snatch and clean.

Wrong...wrong...wrong...wrong...

I think I understand where this mistake comes from, though. People watch videos of the Olympics and World Championships and they see the best lifters in the world. When these lifters pull their snatches and cleans, there's a change of speed after the bar passes the knees. The second phase of the pull (from the mid-thigh to the finish of the pulling movement) is almost always more accelerated and explosive than the first pull from the floor to the knees. I think inexperienced coaches are watching this and thinking those lifters are deliberately pulling the bar slowly from the floor and then ripping the crap out of it once it passes the knees.

This isn't what's happening.

These top international lifters are snatching and cleaning massive weights, more than most people in the world can even deadlift. Because of this, that first pull is simply going to look a little slower. When a 170 lb man cleans 450, the bar isn't going to fly off the floor like an empty broomstick. The initial part of the movement is going to be slower simply because the weight is so enormous. But those lifters are NOT thinking to themselves, "I need to go really slow at the beginning of this lift." Believe me, they're trying to build speed as quickly as possible.

When you watch their light warm-up attempts with 150 lbs or whatever, the first pull from the floor usually looks a little faster. But it's not insanely faster than their heavy record attempts because there's an overall rhythm of the movement that needs to be kept consistent.

In 25 years of competitive weightlifting, I've never heard a coach of any significant experience tell an athlete to pull the bar slowly from the floor. Now, there might be times with new lifters when the athlete is pulling the bar from the floor with so much speed that it's causing some other technique screw-ups (rounding of the back, lunging forward onto the toes, butt shooting straight up in the air, etc.) When this happens, I think the best feedback to use is something like "Keep your back tighter" or "Don't let your butt shoot straight up at the beginning," something like that. There might be a few rare cases where the words "slow down at the beginning" will be necessary, but I wouldn’t make a coaching practice out of it. I think most of these technique problems can be fixed by giving the athlete some other kind of feedback instead of "go slower." Generally, you don't want to tell a racehorse to stop acting like a racehorse.

When I started lifting, I was taught the rule, "You want to pull the bar as fast as possible from the floor while still maintaining proper balance and positions." And I was taught by some pretty successful weightlifting coaches. This is what I've always believed, and always will. Please read that rule carefully and consider the whole statement before you start to misinterpret what I’m saying. You don’t want to take complete beginners and tell them to start uncontrollably hauling ass. Proper movements have to be taught sensibly. But as the lifter develops, it’s a big mistake to teach deliberate slow pulling.

This is a speed sport, people. Many of you have had the experience when you went to your first big weightlifting meet, you watched the lifters in the warm-up room, and you just couldn’t believe how fast they were. Remember that? You’ll always see more explosiveness and acceleration in the finishing phase of the pull, but that doesn’t mean the initial phase should be slow. If you want to be a good lifter, you have to start generating speed as soon as the plates separate from the floor.

Speaking of top world-level lifters, here’s another way you could look at this. Many of the biggest weights in the history of the sport were lifted by the Bulgarian athletes of the 1980s. Most of you didn’t know that because the weight classes have been changed in weightlifting a couple of times over the last 20 years, and the old world records were erased when this happened. People are in awe (and they should be) of Lu Xiaojun currently clean and jerking 204 kilos (449 lbs) at 77 kilo bodyweight (170 lbs). But those of us from the old school remember Alexander Varbanov of Bulgaria hitting 215.5 kilos (474 lbs) at 75 bodyweight (165) back in 1987. The reason I’m mentioning this is because you can learn a lot about speed from watching those Bulgarians from the 80s. Get on YouTube and see if you can find old videos of guys like Varbanov, Asen Zlatev, Mikhail Petrov, Borislav Gidikov, etc. You’ll see what I mean.

This blog is actually going to be #1 in a three-part series about common technical errors I’m seeing all over the place. There are two other big ones I’ll address in the coming weeks. But if this speed issue applies to you, work on it. And if you’re teaching people to move slowly, you should consider some retooling of your methods.

Just a thought.