Weightlifting Forums

A pinball that often gets knocked around in my head is the notion of a framework that is able to consistently explain, or rather explore how an athlete performs a movement and what is fundamental to "good technique".

A lot of the visual and kinematic descriptors of technique fall short to me, as athletes have success with and without nearly all of the common ones. Usually when someone has success without a person's pet rule for technique, they're simply discarded as an outlier/freak. No investigation necessary.

Things like hip/thigh "contact", flat feet vs heel elevation, full vs partial extension, ideal positions etc are both supported and violated by many of the greatest performers, historically and currently. Pei Xinyi should have her Chinese citizenship revoked for "thigh contact" in the clean and snatch.

So I pose the question - what is responsible for motor production in weightlifting, what is "technique" and subsequently, what is "good technique"?
I'm not entirely sure I have satisfactory answers, but I don't know if that's because my answers are shitty.

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Borrowing from variations of dynamic systems theory/ecological dynamics, I feel that movements emerge from contextual factors such as organismic factors, environmental factors and task factors.

In a momentary sense, "good technique" is therefore the ability to problem solve (consciously and unconsciously) the movement problem for the task within the contextual contributors to movement.

On an bio-ish mechanical level, a successful solution needs to manage and distribute the physical demands (e.g. impulse, peak force, dF/dt, duration of force) of the movement on the athlete's systems and tissues, relative to their capacity. If the tissue or system lacks capacity or tolerance for a particular movement, the particular movement cannot be completed as desired.

I think Hill's three-element muscle model is useful for understanding tissues, their force-production characteristics and relation to movement in weightlifting. However, this needs to be paired with neural factors as it is ultimately the neuro-muscular-skeletal system that is responsible for force production. Practical examples would be analysis of the different limiting factors in the pull and catch of snatches/cleans, jerk mechanics etc.

Technical/physical preparation and development on the other hand, seems a different process to the problem solving for momentarily ideal technique. Typically, preparation and development is oriented around trying to control the athlete's movements to centre around a given targeted movement by targeting "weaknesses". I think this can be a useful model but can be highly arbitrary based on the standards that are selected. I still use it, but there's something lacking and unsatisfactory about it.

Away from the realm of the ethereal, I think mechanics is often mangled in weightlifting sport science and coaching.

Too many studies and coaches focus on positions. Positions arise from movements, which arise from forces ultimately generated by the neuro-muscular-skeletal system of the athlete, acceleration of the barbell and gravity.

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I think balance in weightlifting is often defined as the vertical alignment of the athlete-barbell centre of mass over the base of support. However, this is a notion of balance that only applies to statics; weightlifters are not architecture. This approximates the notion that net force and net moment of the athlete-barbell system should equal zero in the transverse plane. I will add that recovery of balance should be considered a component of weightlifting balance skill as well.

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Anecdotally, there is a frequent false-dichotomy between emphasising the technical importance of pulling higher and catching lower. I think for momentary technique, the lifter should pull in whichever way makes the catch easiest, which of course depends on individual physical characteristics.

Kakhi Kakhiashvili (amongst others) "cut the pull" maintaining balance in the catch instead of swinging it rearward and the height wasn't an issue given the bar had sufficient momentum and height to give him enough time to brake the bar in the catch.

On the other hand, Peng Cuiting has the longest pull because she has no leg strength or back strength. As bar height is a limiting factor, she pulls the bar backwards as she's able to generate the most vertical force that way and is willing to trade-off the greater difficulty of balance in the catch.

I think both of them are kinda lifting the same to be honest, just with different bodies.

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This seems obvious, but increasing the height of the pull requires more time/distance vertically accelerating the bar, and minimising vertical deceleration of the bar.

Deliberate delayed acceleration of the barbell is taught as "Chinese/Asian" technique but doesn't make sense and isn't practised amongst the best of the Asian lifters. I think a big part of this is the overemphasis on using #quads, rather than using the entire lower limb to produce force by any means necessary. I don't see these systems do much dynamic hamstring strengthening, possibly a reason why they have to slow down to control the pull.

What is also common is vertical deceleration of the barbell during the pull in search of positions, or in an attempt to increase the peak power of the second pull. This happens very obviously with some of the Chinese/Indonesian/Uzbek lifters towards the end of the first pull.

It also happens in the transition prior to the second pull, where the bar vertically decelerates because it's trajectory is oriented very rearwardly or because people are too obsessed with the peak power of the "power position". See - hip cleaning. Yanking feels fast, but I don't know any drag racers who step on the brakes mid race to spool up their turbo and woosh at the end. Seems kinda counterproductive.

Just push up throughout the whole lift, build momentum and don't fall over.

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The timing between the end of the extension/v_max, v₀ and fixation of the elbows needs to be minimised, to minimise the downward impulse of the system and therefore impulsive force in the catch. IMO it's very important for consistency and attempt success.

Related, the argument about shrugging up, shrugging down or not shrugging is really pointless. Cues are just subjective words and reminders. If lifters executed instructions, all you would need to do is recite a recipe.

Elevation and upward rotation of the scapulae are coupled. Lifters who have good capacity in upward rotation may not find benefit from deliberate elevation, lifters who have poor capacity in upward rotation may find benefit from deliberate elevation.

Conversations that are sorely absent in sport preparation as a whole, and weightlifting is no different.

'Good technique' or what a person could refer to as mastery, I define as 'the removal of redundancy'. Is there anything present in the execution of the sporting task that could be jettisoned yet still produced.

To borrow David Deutch's statement about good explanations, 'A good explanation is hard to vary whilst it still explains what it claims to explain using that as an approach to coaching a sporting task, Good technique is hard to vary whilst still performing what is claims to perform.

The pluralism of technique is answerable very simply by the variance of people - even within the superheavy men and 45kg women there is great variance. So the 'best technical model' is the one that is the best for them given the rules of the sport, their current state of preparation and a conjecture about their potential. As you say, 'a successful solution needs to manage and distribute the physical demands. But at all times we can ask, is there redundancy and is it costing us?

Its the system latency problem that makes for the biggest challenge, as you state 'momentarily ideal technique'. One capacity of fitness alters over time, it pushes up against the sufficiency in some other fitness capacity. Have we erroneously detached one component of the task and caused a new problem elsewhere? How long will this adaptation take?

It leaves me with, 'Within the variance of given lifters, where optimisation of adaptable systems will occur, can I remove variance/redundancy whilst accounting for systemic latency - and still perform a legal rep?' (Fuck that's a mouthful, I'll try to condense that later when I'm driving or something)

I have come to realise that in my mind when I am coaching both technical issues and programming (at some point they cannot be separated) in my head I am viewing it like a 'traveling salesman problem'. I know that there are capacities of fitness and laws of physics and biomechanics that must be accounted for, and I try to ensure that they are visited both as an original installation of the skill and in an on-going sense. While I'm doing that I'm thinking about how can I get this lifter to do less but produce the same or more.