Starting Strength

contact, it would be best if the distance the bar had to travel unpowered could be reduced. The wide grip allows a savings of 5–6 inches over the distance of the pull, although it alters the start position on the ground. A wide grip produces the functional equivalent of short arms, making the lifter’s back angle more horizontal in the starting position. You may need to compensate for this angle by pointing your toes and knees out a little more to provide more clearance between the thighs for the belly.

    Figure 6-48. The difference in back angle in the two pulls, resulting from the change in grip width.

    The snatch, upon superficial inspection, looks like it is accomplished by using the arms to lift the bar overhead. Perhaps the wide grip fools the uninformed eye – the clean seems easier to understand as a pull. But the movement must be appreciated as a jump with the barbell in the hands, followed by a catch overhead, made possible by a drop into position that straightens out the arms. The bar is not lifted into place with the arms, and it is not swung into place through an arc-shaped bar path. The jump carries the bar up in an essentially vertical line if it is done efficiently, just like every other barbell exercise performed while standing on the floor.

    Figure 6-49. The power snatch.

    The power snatch – frequently the hang version done from what we call the jumping position – is a favorite exercise of post–high school strength coaches because it is a long movement, it requires some athletic ability, and it is explosive. In fact, the highest power outputs ever recorded in human movement are generated at the second-pull position of the snatch. It can be done by bigger guys who can’t rack a clean, it’s no more difficult to learn than a power clean, and if you know how to do it already, you’ll impress the right people in the college weight room. But it is done with lighter weights, so it doesn’t have the potential to cause the same level of adaptation as the clean does. The power snatch is frequently looped, it requires enough shoulder flexibility to make an effective shrug in the lockout position over the shoulders, and its longer bar path provides more time to screw up, so it presents perhaps more technical challenges than the does power clean.
     
    The power snatch uses essentially the same teaching method as the power clean, and it takes about the same amount of time to learn. Again, we learn the movement from the top down, perfecting the jump and the catch in the rack position, and then tacking the deadlift onto the front of the movement off the floor.
    So, we’ll start the same way, with the empty bar in the hands at the top of the pull. This will be the hang position , just as in the clean. The hang position will be the default position for holding the bar between reps while you’re learning to perform the movement. Again, a PVC pipe or a broomstick is too light to learn to pull anything with, and you need to have the right equipment if you want to lift weights. Women really should consider the smaller-diameter 15 kg bar if snatching is in the program; their usually smaller hands have a hard enough time making a grip at the angle at which they meet the bar in a snatch. For men, any 20 kg bar will do for right now. It is true that Olympic weightlifting bars are better for the snatch and the clean and jerk at heavy weights, but for novices learning the movement, most any bar will work well enough.
    The snatch grip has been described by many authors as being derived from some percentage of arm length, with measurements taken and the bar marked. The reality of the situation is that everybody will adjust the grip to a position that works for them, no matter how much precision was used in originally determining the grip. And what works will be determined by where the bar strikes you as you jump. If your grip is too narrow, you lose the advantage of using a wide grip (duh), and if it’s too wide, you hit yourself in the hip pointers. So the optimal grip will place the bar somewhere between the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS) and the pubis for everybody ( Figure 6-50 ).

    Figure 6-50. Grip width places the bar above the pubis and below the ASIS (the hip pointer).

The best way to set the grip is to stand up with the bar and slide your hands out wide (and obviously overhand) to a point near the sleeves where the bar rests against your lower belly, just below your hip pointers and just