Starting Strength

balance between the lifter/barbell system and the balance point in the middle of the foot.
    Any other bar position has the potential to create two problems. The first problem, occurring when a barbell is pulled from a position forward of the mid-foot, is a moment arm between the barbell and the balance point. The lifter must compensate for this moment arm in some way, either by moving the bar back into balance or by applying the extra force needed to act against both the load on the bar and the effect of the moment arm. The distance also has a detrimental effect on the hip, knee, and back angles, causing them to assume less-than-optimal relationships with each other and the bar. This is intuitively obvious if you stand with the bar a couple of feet in front of you – the distance is a huge problem, and when it is exaggerated in this way, the reason is clear. Cut the distance in half by stepping forward, and pulling will be easier but still not correct. Halve the distance again and the trend becomes apparent: the closer you are to the bar, the easier it is to pull; and the reason is the distance’s effect on the leverage against the mid-foot.
    Even a casual examination of the bar paths of heavy deadlifts, cleans, and snatches demonstrates a tendency for a barbell pulled from a position forward of the mid-foot to move back into balance, producing a curved bar path off the floor. The heavier the pull, as in deadlifts, the smaller the curve in height and amplitude. The lighter the pull, as in snatches, the larger the horizontal displacement that can be tolerated, and the higher the bar can go before settling into balance over the mid-foot. (Some snatches may be so light relative to the lifter’s absolute strength that they can be pulled through their entire bar path out of balance.) You can see, then, that balance exists directly over the mid-foot, and that it makes sense to design your pulling technique to conform to this physical reality by pulling the bar off the floor in a straight vertical path.

    Figure 4-22. The correct start position in the standard pulling model. Note the angle at which the arm hangs relative to vertical.

    The second problem, occurring with any bar position that is not slightly behind the front of the shoulders, is a lack of equilibrium between the bar and the lifter’s arms and spine; to obtain this equilibrium, people tend to move into the correct position during the pull. In this position, your shoulders will be slightly in front of the bar, and your arms will not be perpendicular to the floor. It is a common feature of all pulls from the floor that after the back angle stops changing – i.e., the back has settled into a stable angle as the knees and hips extend at the bottom of the pull – the arms do not hang vertically. They hang at an angle of somewhere between 7–10 degrees behind vertical, placing the shoulders just in front of the bar and, perhaps coincidentally, directly under the scapulas. Most Olympic weightlifting coaches teach this position, shoulders in front of the bar, and a quick online search through the many thousands of available videos of deadlifts, cleans, and snatches, viewed frame by frame, will quickly demonstrate the universal nature of the shoulders-forward position during the pull.
    A continuum can be observed from light to heavy pulls: snatches, being very light relative to deadlifting capacity, can be observed to poorly conform to this model for some inefficient lifters. Cleans, being heavier than snatches but still lighter than deadlifts, are more likely to conform, and heavy deadlifts almost always conform as soon as the bar leaves the floor. Furthermore, the tendency of the lifter/barbell system to seek equilibrium in the shoulders-forward position is so inherent in pulling the barbell that if someone tries to pull with vertical or behind-vertical arms, the back angle will change – either before the pull starts or during the first part of the pull – in order to produce this position. The tendency to do this varies with weight in the same way the tendency of the bar to move toward the mid-foot balance point does, with snatches showing a lot of back-angle change over a longer portion of the pull, cleans showing much less, and deadlifts almost always starting the plates right off the floor with the same back angle used until the bar approaches the knees.
    Keep in mind that a straight vertical bar path is the most physically efficient expression of