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This will be the last installment in this little three-part technique problem series I’m doing. The issue I’m going to address here is something I’ve been noticing for a very long time, and it’s spreading. Weightlifting newbies are constantly being infected with it. New victims are popping up all over the place, like zombies in "The Walking Dead." We’ve gotta do something about this, before we all get overrun.

Actually, we’re talking about a combination of different technique glitches, and the first one is often the cause of multiple others.

The first problem is very simple…athletes using a snatch grip that’s way too narrow. When I think about the lifters I’ve worked with over the last few years who had previous instruction in the snatch, I would say almost every single one of them had their hands too close together on the bar when I saw their lifts for the first time. This is one of the easiest fixes for a coach, because all you have to do is tell the athlete to move their hands out wider. 99.9% of the times I’ve done this, it was an immediate improvement. When they do their first snatch with the wider grip position, the reaction is almost always, “Wow! That feels so much better!”

I totally understand where this problem is starting. Most of the people who are doing the OLifts these days learned them from a CrossFit coach. We all know how snatching fits in as a component of CrossFit training. CrossFitters do these workouts called Fran or Grace or Tammy or Norma, whatever. In these workouts, they have to do fifty snatches with 61 pounds in eleven seconds or something like that. Because of the need to get lots of reps in a short amount of time, technical precision isn’t a top priority. And because the weight on the bar is so light, the lifter can use really crappy technique and still complete their lifts. When they’re doing this, their snatch technique really doesn’t look much like actual snatching. It’s more like a two-handed overhead hoist. Instead of looking like weightlifters performing snatches, they look like farm workers lifting a wounded pig over a fence or something.

If the pig-hoist movement helps you get a really awesome time on your Norma workout, that’s awesome. However, you’re going to have some serious problems when you try to make the transition into snatching heavier weights and actually attempting a one-rep max. You see, snatching with a close grip almost always causes other technical problems with the lift. One of them is the bar being too far away from the body during the pull. When an athlete performs a snatch, one of the most crucial components is keeping the bar as close to the body as possible during the second pull phase (when the bar is traveling past the abdomen, chest, and then eventually past the face into a lockout position overhead). If you watch world-level athletes and look at their snatches in slow motion, you’ll see what I mean. That bar stays very tight to the body.

When a lifter is snatching with a grip that’s too narrow, a problem occurs that’s a little hard to describe in words. That narrow grip limits the athlete’s ability to keep the bar close to the body, and you’ll almost always see an excessive gap between the torso and the bar as it travels upwards. I’ve always called it “being bunched up” for lack of a better term. Sure, there are occasional people who can snatch with a narrow grip and still keep the bar close to the body, contradicting the point I’m making. And if you grab a broomstick or PVC pipe right now and pull a few snatches with a narrow grip, you’ll probably be able to keep it relatively close to your body because you’re really thinking about it. However, I’m talking about new and intermediate lifters who are trying to learn the movement in the infant stages. Once you’ve coached a few hundred of these people, you’ll see what I mean. A narrow snatch grip usually results in too much separation between the bar and the body during the second pull. It might stay close to the body when it’s passing the abdomen and chest, but the problem really surfaces when it’s passing the upper shoulders and face. It’s just hard to get a quick, snappy snatch turnover when the hands are close together.

I haven’t even touched on hip drive problems, either. When lifters get into more advanced technical development and they start to learn how to increase power and acceleration by driving the hips into the bar, using a narrow snatch grip is going to screw it up. They’re going to make contact with the bar at their mid-upper thigh, which damages the speed (and trajectory) of the movement in most cases. Great snatching happens when the bar tucks right into that hip notch at the top of the thigh and then the athletes can just drive their hips and extend upwards with all the murderous force they can muster. If the arms can then be used properly to keep the bar close to the torso and stick the lockout over the ears, you’ve got perfection. You’ve mastered the hardest movement that can be performed with a barbell.

There are other aspects of this analysis that I’m intentionally leaving out because I don’t want this blog to be nineteen pages long. The easiest way to describe it in a nutshell is this…snatching is supposed to be a quick, choppy movement with the fastest turnover possible. A wide grip is required to make this happen, period. If you don’t believe me, just watch some World Championship weightlifting on YouTube. You don’t see narrow-grip snatching. Of course there are occasional exceptions to the rule, but they’re rare.

I’ve never used a specific method to determine grip width, by the way. I don’t think there’s one comprehensive way to do it because it’s so dependent on the athlete’s individual characteristics. It’s basically just a process of eyeballing it and blending the athlete’s feedback about what feels effective with your own judgment as a coach.

That’ll do it, brothers and sisters. I’ve tried to give you three solid blog posts about technical evils that can hurt your performance. As I said at the very beginning of this whole thing, I hate writing about weightlifting technique because of all the “I disagree…” and “You forgot to mention something…” and “On the other hand…” stuff that oozes out of the internet like oily discharge from an infected hemorrhoid. I know it’s good to have healthy debates and disagreements, but it’s aggravating when it comes from people who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. I took the risk for you guys and wrote this stuff anyway, because I care about you. I’m a loving nurturer who believes in positive affirmations and sensitive communication.

So I want to wish successful training to all of you who take these words the right way. Everybody else can suck it with the power of a thousand hurricanes.