Episode 1779 - Top 2 exercises to improve your Olympic weightlifting

Alan Fredendall // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete division leader Alan Fredendall discusses how effective the strict press & front squat are in developing maximal performance in the clean & jerk and snatch.​

Take a listen to the episode or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

ALAN FREDENDALLGood morning, everybody. Welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Happy Friday morning. We hope your morning is off to a great start. My name is Alan. I'm happy to be your host today. Currently have the pleasure of serving as a lead faculty in our fitness athlete division. It is Fitness Athlete Friday. It is the best darn day of the week. We talk all things CrossFit, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, running, rowing, biking, swimming, If you are working with an individual who is active recreationally, trying to be competitive, whatever it is, Fitness Athlete Friday is full of tips and tricks for you. Today we're going to be talking about Olympic weightlifting. Olympics start today. Opening ceremony is just a couple hours away, 12 Eastern. And we'll be watching America's Olympic weightlifters take the stage in a couple of weeks on August 7th. And so talking about if we only could do two exercises to have a significant improvement on our Olympic weightlifting, what those exercises might be. We certainly see a lot of interesting suggestions on social media about ways to improve our performance, improve our technique, improve our clean and jerk and snatch.

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? But if we look to the research, what is actually the most effective? So today, we're going to be referencing a paper from Arthur Zetshin and colleagues back from 2023. In the Journal of strength and conditioning research, the title is associations between foundational strength and weightlifting exercises in highly trained weightlifters support for general strength components. And so we're going to talk about what this paper is, what this paper looked at, what this paper found, analyzing the outcomes of this paper, and then how to take those and apply them in the clinic, in the gym with our patients and athletes. So, with this paper, what was the research question? The research question, is there an argument for doing some specific general strength movements that would translate to higher skill, higher technique barbell movements, specifically in Olympic weightlifting, the clean and jerk and the snatch. And if those movements exist, what are they and how much do they contribute to the performance of the clean and jerk and the snatch? And so this paper, looking at it really quickly, took 19 highly trained Olympic weightlifters. They all had been performing Olympic weightlifting training for at least five years. and had them perform a one rep max of a couple different movements across the two week period in randomized order. So they asked them to max out their clean and jerk, max out their snatch, max out their deadlift, max out their strict press, and max out their front squat, and across 14 days, every couple of days, perform one of those max attempts, and then analyzing the data and trying to observe any sort of relationship in the variance between performance on what we consider the power lifts or the strength movements, which would be the deadlift, the strict press, and the front squat, and then compare that to how does that translate to what that person's max clean and jerk and what that person's max snatch is. And some really interesting data here, finding that 59% of the variance of the contribution to the clean and jerk is associated with maximal strict press and front squat strength. And that 62% of the variance in contribution to performance on a snatch is also associated with maximal performance on a one rep max strict press and front squat. And so finding in this paper that there is really no association at all between how strong someone's deadlift is in their performance on the clean and jerk and snatch. And you might think that's interesting because I might assume somebody who has a heavier deadlift should be able to have a heavier clean and jerk or snatch. But as we've taught in Fitness Athlete in our Level 1 course, our Level 2 course, our live course, for many, many years, when we really dig deep into the research on what's happening with the deadlift, we know it's not a pull off the floor and neither is the clean and neither is the snatch. That when we take somebody, whether they are going to just deadlift to the hip or whether they're going to bring that barbell, to the front rack position with a clean or all the way overhead with a snatch, that first pull off the floor is really kind of a misnomer to call that a pull. That is a press off the floor and we have several studies that look at EMG activation in the body of what is happening with a deadlift, what is happening with the first pull of a clean or snatch. And we know that the quadriceps are the most active muscle during that first pull. And that tells us it's not a pull, right? It is a press off the floor. That's how we instruct athletes in the gym, patients in the clinic, that this is a press off the floor. Imagine you're sitting on a leg press machine. If we took you in your deadlift setup position and rotated you 90 degrees, got rid of the barbell, put the weight on a plate underneath your feet, you would look like you were sitting on a leg press machine. And so it is a press off the floor. And so it makes sense that because it is a partial range of motion press off the floor, that it just does not contribute as much as we might think to our clean and jerk and our snatch performance. But finding that we had moderate to high correlations between strict press and front squat strength with both clean and jerk and snatch performance. So why is that? Why these lifts? How can we interpret that analysis? When we really think about what a clean is and what a snatch is, Try to keep it simple, especially in the CrossFit realm where people may have never been exposed to these movements before. Often our cueing is very simple. Hey, a clean, we're going to jump off the ground and land in a front squat. A snatch, we're going to jump off the ground and we're going to land in an overhead squat. And so Olympic weightlifters already do a lot of front squats, they need a lot of thoracic and shoulder strength, they need to keep their clean as close to the front squat as possible, because that is half of their score in Olympic weightlifting, right? Just two movements clean and jerk and snatch, you got to be got to be good at both of them. Likewise, a snatch is a jump into an overhead squat. And while the study didn't look at performance of overhead squat compared to snatch, It makes sense that a front squat would pair really well with a snatch. When you think about the receiving position of a snatch, a very vertical torso, very strong, stable shoulder position, it requires strength and mobility out of every joint in the body. You need to have excellent shoulder mobility and strength. You need to have excellent thoracic mobility and strength, excellent hip mobility and strength, excellent knee and ankle mobility and strength. a really, really vertical torso position in the bottom of that snatch. And so that front squat really sets us up a strong, tall, vertical torso position. We are training our legs in a squat pattern. We're working on our thoracic and shoulder strength and mobility at the same time. And so it checks a lot of boxes that we see and makes sense that it translates well to the snatch position. What we see, though, in a lot of other research is that we always look at the back squat, and we look at relationships between back squat strength and Olympic weightlifting, and we often find almost no relationship. And that also makes sense. Back squats tend to have more of a forward torso, more of a hinge-dominant position, especially if somebody is a powerlifter, in a way that just does not translate as well to movements like the clean and the snatch. And so understanding that it makes sense that these relatively simple, boring movements, the strict press and the front squat are showing to be really good developers for our clean and our snatch.

APPLYING THE RESEARCH So what can we do with this data? What does that help us do in the clinic, in the gym with our patients and athletes? Well first things first, you're probably not going to blow any Olympic weightlifters mind if you tell them they need to get a stronger strict press and they need to get a stronger front squat if they want to be a better Olympic weightlifter, right? Most of them are probably gonna say, yeah, I knew that before I came to this appointment. Do you have anything else for me? When we look at folks who are training specifically Olympic weightlifting, they are already doing a lot of overhead lifting, they're already doing a lot of squatting, often several sessions per week, right? It's not uncommon to find competitive Olympic weightlifters performing some combination of back squats, front squats, overhead squats every other day throughout their week as they're training. Likewise, they're doing a lot of strict press, they're doing a lot of push press, they're doing a lot of jerks, they're doing a lot of accessory work that's going to reinforce overhead lifting. and squat patterns as well. So you're probably not gonna really rock the boat with a true, dedicated, even recreationally competitive Olympic weightlifter and definitely not somebody that is trying to be a professional or is already a professional Olympic weightlifter. They are hopefully already doing all of this stuff in a way that you don't have a lot to intervene on. But outside of that, somebody who maybe wants to get more into Olympic weightlifting, and especially with our functional fitness athletes, our CrossFit athletes who are doing clean and jerk and doing snatch as part of their CrossFit training, they always want to have a heavier clean and jerk and a heavier snatch, right? If they're coming to you and saying, is there anything I could do? I have an extra 30 minutes a week. I have an extra hour a week. I really want to get a stronger clean and jerk and a stronger snatch. For that population, it's tough to recommend to them just do more clean and jerk and snatch. because they're likely already doing it as part of their CrossFit training and they may even be doing it throughout the week in different variations, right? To be doing a high repetition, low load, power snatch and then metabolic conditioning workout and then maybe to maybe later in the week doing a strength piece that looks like higher load, lower volume snatching focused on developing the snatch. So it'd be tough for that person to recommend that they somehow find time in that same week to do more snatching. Instead, what is going to be a really effective and safe recommendation as far as not introducing too much volume to that equation is to recommend to that person, hey, find some time to do more strict press and more front squat. We talked a lot back in episode 1745 back during deltoid week of the importance of the strict press for developing the deltoid, that the deltoid is the powerhouse of the shoulder, but strict press is often neglected or completely ignored in programming. People skip strict press day when it's at the CrossFit gym. They may skip it when it shows up in accessory programming because it's not fun, right? They may do a push press or push jerk or split jerk instead. which doesn't really help improve our clean and jerk as much as it could and our snatch as much as it could because we're not training the shoulder as much as we're now training the legs when we transition to a push press or a jerk motion. Way back, episode 1567 with Midge Babcock, the title of that episode, Don't Be a Jerk with Your Jerks, he covered a lot of research that shows as we transition to that push press, as we transition to that jerk, we're now using 60 to 80% from our legs to get that weight overhead. And so we're not really developing true shoulder strength as much as if we do the strict press. And so just recognizing with that CrossFit that functional fitness population, they're probably skipping or not doing really foundational strength movements like the strict press, And like the front squat, because they are seen as boring, right? They are seen as maybe repetitious. But that is kind of the point that by doing those things more consistently, more frequently, we're going to bump up our front squat strength, our strict press strength, and we'll see a nice translation to improvements in our clean and jerk and snatch. alongside also continuing to do the clean and jerk and the snatch. And so my recommendation for a lot of folks who come to see me for help with maybe performance of what can I do, I have some extra time, is to give them some sort of undulating program that allows them hopefully in the span of the same week to touch a clean, touch a jerk, touch a snatch, a front squat and a strict press maybe even within that same week. And so, teaching those patients, those athletes, of how to optimize their sessions. Of hey, if you're gonna go into the gym, and you wanna introduce more of this stuff, what does it look like? It looks like we should do the Olympic lift first, we should do the power movement first, because those muscle fibers are gonna be the easiest to fatigue, and the longest to recover. So if we're going to clean or snatch that day, we should do that first. We can follow that up with what we might call a power lift, a strength movement. we don't need to be as explosive with those movements, those fibers are not as fatigued. And so we can do something like a clean, and then do a front squat, we could do something like a snatch, and then do a front squat, we could do a clean, and then we could do a strict press. And then at the end of the hour, towards the end of our session, whatever our timeframe might be, we have time for maybe a conditioning piece, if we're a crossfitter, and we want to keep working on our metabolic conditioning, or maybe just some extra accessory work to further develop leg strength, overhead strength, core strength, all the stuff that we need to be a really solid Olympic weightlifter. And so that might look like moving back and forth between power variations of the snatch and clean and adding in extra front squatting, making sure that we're not squatting too much, we're not lifting overhead too much, and just trying to find them a nice blend where they can add in some extra volume without increasing their risk for injury in a way that they're gonna find that time well spent and see those clean and jerk see those snatch numbers go up. And I always love when somebody just wants to do weightlifting, they don't want to do any conditioning that day or anything else. I love my favorite piece for developing overhead strength. Every two minutes for 15 sets, you're going to do five sets of three reps of a strict press somewhere between 70 80% of your max. You're going to transition to five sets of three push press, again, somewhere 70 to 80% of your max push press, and then finish out same rep scheme, same idea with the jerk. And so as our shoulders get fatigued, we bring in more and more of the legs in a way that overloads the shoulders really nice and gets us a nice 30 minute weightlifting session. And so that can always be beneficial for patients as well.

SUMMARY What can you do? What can you advise someone when they want to improve their clean and jerk and snatch and they're not already a professional elite Olympic weightlifter, share with them that the most bang for their buck is going to be working in more strict press and more front squat into their training. Ideally, if we can do that every week, increase that consistency, increase that frequency, we know that's going to be a way that's going to productively overload the system. We know the research supports that those two movements have the highest contribution to performance on the clean and jerk and snatch, and that's really where we can help athletes work that into their programming and see them develop the clean and jerk and snatch the way they want so that they can hit new PRs. Team, if you like to learn about this stuff, if you like to hear about this stuff, our next class of clinical management fitness athlete level one online begins this next Monday. We have about eight seats left. Those will definitely be gone by the end of the weekend before the class starts. That literally happens every cohort and has happened for every cohort for many, many, many years. So don't be that person that emails on Tuesday morning. We're going to have to tell you the class is full. And then if you've already taken Fitness Athlete Level 1, Fitness Athlete Level 2, start September 2nd after Labor Day, and that class is already over half full, that'll probably be the last class of Fitness Athlete Level 2 for the year, so don't miss that one if you're on your way to working towards your Clinical Management Fitness Athlete certification. That's all I've got for you this Friday morning. I hope you have an awesome weekend. Enjoy the opening ceremony, the start to the Olympics, and keep an eye out for Team USA lifting on August 7th. Have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. Bye, everybody.

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