Keep Your
Hands on the Bar
by Coach Dan Bell
Anatoli
Pisarenko (photo credit unknown)
A detail of weightlifting technique not
often discussed is to keep your hands fully on the bar in a clean as
you turn it over and put it on your shoulders. This will help the
lifter meet the bar smoothly and stay tight as the weight drives them
into the hole. I am not necessarily talking about keeping the hook
grip all the way to the rack position. It is okay to let the thumb
pop out when turning over the bar, but the hands should stay closed
on the bar, the palms still in contact with the bar.
Why does this matter? When you open
your hand and loosen your grip on the bar, you lose “contact”
with it. You don’t have the feel of precise interaction with the
bar, so you cannot feel the precise location of the bar and your body
in relation to each other. Given that your job when moving under the
bar is to meet it as precisely as possible and be tight against it as
it tries to drive you down, it is unwise to lose control of it. You
have to know where the bar is in space, be able to feel where it is,
to meet it smoothly. To do that as well as possible, you need to keep
your palms on the bar.
A common result of opening your hand
and letting the bar fall to your fingertips when turning it over is
the bar “crashing” on you. If you open your hand when your elbows
whip around the bar, you tend to pass the bar and drop by it, leaving
a gap between the bar your shoulders. When the falling bar closes
that gap—crashes on you—it rocks you out of balance, and can
cause your upper back to soften and give way. This often leads to a
miss, but not always. The fight to stand up with a
tougher-than-necessary clean, however, spends much of the energy
needed for a strong jerk. Here, Rubber City Weightlifting’s Glen
Kalbaugh opens his hands as he turns over a clean:
While he is a little late getting under
the bar, by opening his hands he exacerbates the problem. We’ve
already started working to correct this.
Many lifters let the hands open because
this allows the elbows to get higher when meeting the clean. “Elbows
up!” is a coaching cue they have probably heard many times. This
can be misleading. The effort to get the elbows up in the clean is a
roundabout way to tighten the upper back when meeting the clean. A
lifter may or may not achieve a tight upper back this way. It is
easily possible to lift the elbows high and have a soft upper back.
What the lifter should be thinking of is lifting the chest up
while meeting the bar. The only way to lift the sternum (chest)
up is to engage the spinal erector muscles of the upper back. Chest
up, not elbows up, will tighten the upper back and make the upper
torso a solid platform to meet the bar. Here is RCW’s Kat Lee,
58kg, keeping her hands on the bar with 100kg:
A
couple more good examples:
Norik Vardanian
Tatiana Kasharina
I can already hear the complaints that,
“I don’t have the shoulder or wrist mobility to do that!” Most
of the lifters saying this have given half a try at getting the
necessary mobility to keep their hands on the bar, but only that. It
doesn’t come easily or quickly, often taking months to achieve the
position, and requiring constant maintenance to keep it. If you want
to be the best lifter you can be, do it. The stretches and mobility
exercises that help are common knowledge in most weightlifting gyms,
but persistent effort on them is not at all common.
One simple way to
help get and keep the required mobility is to front squat with hands
closed on the bar. Your front squat may go down at first, and it can
be mildly painful. Do it anyway. Working on the mobility to keep your
hands on the bar will be far more productive than running to your
laptop to hunt down great lifters who don’t keep their hands on the
bar. You’ll find some. They won’t help you clean more, though.
Keeping your hands on the bar will.
Dan Bell will be instructing the next Vulcan Weightlifting Seminar at Asheville Strength & Conditioning April 18th-19th. See details and registration information Here.