The Catalyst Athletics forums are turning into hot territory these days, that’s for sure. I find myself on there a lot lately, reading up on the latest strength conversations instead of doing the little jobs around the house my wife wants me to take care of. That should make you, the Performance Menu readers, feel pretty special. I’m spending my free time reading your forum posts and pumping my brain full of your questions and dilemmas while my Christmas lights sit in a big pile in my backyard and my washing machine makes so much noise that it sounds like there’s a severed head in there. That’s my level of commitment to you, brothers and sisters. Hopefully you’ll appreciate this if I come home from work one day and find all my clothes sitting in my driveway. I’m taking one for the team, baby.

Anyway, back to the forums. Technique, technique, TECHNIQUE! That’s what people want help with, no doubt about it. The vast majority of the Olympic weightlifting stuff I see on the internet these days is focused on either technique or programming. Now, it just so happens that I’ve got one mother of a programming project going on right now that I absolutely freaking guarantee you’ll be able to use to make yourself a better lifter or coach, regardless of what level you’re at. But it has to wait a month or so, which means you’ll have to keep reading the Menu. However, the technique area is one that we can get to right now.

Which area of technique are we going to look at in this article? Finishing the pull in the snatch and clean. That’s it. More specifically, we’re going to do an analysis of a topic that’s probably causing one of the most interesting technique discussions in our sport these days. The topic is, “Should the lifter extend up on the toes or stay flat-footed at the top of the pull?” This is a seriously confusing question for new and intermediate lifters who are in the process of building their own technique. Most athletes are smart enough to study the technique of the world’s best lifters as they’re trying to develop their own personal lifting form. The internet has made this a thousand times easier for modern lifters than it was for the older generations because of the wonderful blessing of YouTube. Anybody can get online these days and watch hours of World Championship footage where you can do slow-motion breakdowns of the technique of the best lifters on the planet. But this is where things can get puzzling, because not all world record holders use the same technique. Some of them extend high up on their toes at the top of their snatch/clean pull, and then others basically keep their feet almost completely flat on the floor all the way into the turnover phase. If you’re a newbie, you have to ask yourself, “Which way is the right one?”

Yeah, good question. It’s a really good question, as a matter of fact. What do you say we find an answer to it, so you can start grooving in your own permanent lifting technique and get one step closer to the day when you might be at a World Championship meet yourself, with other rookies watching YOUR technique on YouTube and trying to figure out how the heck you can pop those insane weights.

Explanation of styles

Obviously, we can’t start talking about which technique style is better until we get a clear understanding of each one. First of all, let’s make sure we’re all clear that this article is specifically analyzing the phase of the lift where the athlete is extended into the top position of the snatch or clean pull. This is the moment where the upward pulling movement is hitting its completion and the lifter is on the verge of jumping down into the turnover phase. When this stage is reached, we can start to see some variations in movement between different lifters.

We’ll refer to the first type of technique we’re going to examine as “toe-extension pulling,” for lack of a better phrase. With this technique, the lifter drives and extends up onto the toes at the top of the pull. If you were to do a frame-by-frame video analysis of this technique and then pause the video when the lifter is at the absolute highest extension moment, the body position would closely resemble an athlete who is jumping off the ground. This is why some coaches actually use the verbal cue “JUMP” when coaching weightlifters. This cue can teach the athlete to reach full vertical extension with the feet, knees, hips and torso, which will lead to higher elevation of the barbell. When athletes use toe-extension pulling, there will usually be a loud slapping sound as their feet hit the floor when they jump down into the bottom position. If you’re having trouble telling whether or not the athlete is using toe-extension pulling, this sound is often a dead giveaway. If you hear that slap, it’s probably toe-extension. From a biomechanical standpoint, the basic idea behind toe-extension pulling is that the athlete will be able to lift the barbell to its highest possible point by extending the body to its highest possible point. Maximum force is generated through creating the longest extension line from the floor to the top of the athlete’s body, and that extension line is lengthened by driving up onto the toes. That’s pretty much how it works.

Now, there is another style of pull finishing that you’ll also see if you study world record holders long enough. Again, we’ll invent our own name for this style just so we can read this article more easily. Let’s call this second technique “flat-foot pulling.” Understanding what this technique looks like isn’t too complicated. It basically looks the way it sounds. Here, the athlete is finishing the pull with the body extended, but has not risen up onto the toes prior to turnover. Most of the athlete’s foot stays on the floor throughout the entire pull. With flat-foot pullers, you will likely still see a little rise from the heels at the moment of full extension. But it’s nothing like toe-extension pullers, and you won’t hear the loud stomping sound from the feet when they hit the bottom position either. Biomechanically, the reasoning behind flat-foot pulling is that the athlete will be able to continue generating force into the floor if they keep the surface area of their foot in contact with it. If you keep your feet on the floor, you can drive the body upwards harder. Without getting into scientific jargon, that’s about as simply as we can describe it.

The absolute perfect place to see the contrast between these two styles is the men’s 77 kilo bodyweight class at present day 2011. Two of the best lifters in the world in this weight class are Tigran Martirosyan from Armenia and Xiaojun Lu from China. These two have been taking turns winning the World Championship for the last three years. Their ability levels are extremely close, but their lifting styles are quite different. Tigran is a toe-extension puller, and Lu is a flat-foot puller. If YouTube is convenient for you, check out the World Weightlifting Championships from either 2010 or 2011 in the men’s 77 kilo class. These two athletes have personal records that are within just a few kilos of each other. Tigran’s best snatch is 381 (173kg) pounds, while Lu’s is 383 (174kg). (I know, holy buckets of lizard spit…)They are two of the finest lifters in history in their weight class, and they’re an amazing contrast between the types of pulling form we’re examining here.

More examples…

Knowing that world record weights have been lifted using both toe-extension and flat-foot pulling, one of the obvious questions that pops up is, “Which technique is most common at the highest levels?” We want to know which style gets the greatest results the highest percentage of the time, right? It seems like the safest bet for which technique to model our own lifting after would be the one that has the widest track record of success.

If you study weightlifting long enough, I think you will probably see more toe-extension pullers at the top of the sport. Sometimes, you will see lifters who are extreme toe-pullers, like Zlatan Vanev from Bulgaria. Vanev is a lifter’s lifter, a wild animal who has won multiple world championships with the intensity and aggression of a Norse Berserker. And if you want to see the ultimate example of what we’re talking about when we discuss toe-extension pulling, watch this guy. His explosiveness when he jumps his feet into the bottom position is simply phenomenal. It’s faster and more violent than almost any other lifter you’ll ever see, with the exception of Iran’s Behdad Salimi. Salimi, who recently snatched a new world record of 214 kilos (471 pounds), basically defies physical laws of movement with the power and acceleration he generates into the barbell. He’s a textbook definition of toe-extension pulling. He and Vanev are what I would call hardcore toe-extension pullers, but there are many other examples of great lifters who use this technique with a more moderate level of foot movement. Soviet legend Alexander Kurlovich and women’s world record-holder Svetlana Podobedova are pretty good models of this, along with being two of my favorite lifters of all time.

In a nutshell, you’ll usually see more toe-extension pulling when you look at the best in the world. However, let’s not make the mistake of thinking that there aren’t some great flat-foot pullers in the sport. We mentioned Xiaojun Lu as a flat-foot puller, and it’s worth pointing out that many other Chinese lifters also pull this way. I’m sure it’s being taught over there, because you just see it too commonly from their top world-level lifters to be a coincidence. But if we’re talking about flat-foot pullers, then we can talk about his royal majesty, the supreme imperial grand poobah of Olympic weightlifting, Pyrros Dimas of Greece. Dimas, for those of you who have been living under a rock, is a weightlifting titan who won three Olympic gold medals and was one jerk away from winning four, and he’s a flat-foot puller. His heels come off the ground just a little at the top of his pull, but he absolutely keeps most of his foot on the ground throughout most of the lift.

That brings us to you. You’re a lifter or coach, probably somewhere around the beginner or intermediate level, and you want to know which technique to use. You want to be good at this, so which way do you go?

Go Where the Spirit Leads You…

First, I’ll share my own personal preference as a lifter and a coach. I’m a firm believer in toe-extension pulling, always have been and always will be. I’ve always felt like the only way I can really put some serious pepper on my pull is by leaving the floor, driving up to the tallest point I can get to in the pull before jumping into the receiving position with a good loud smack when my feet hit the platform. I’ve never tried to lift any other way. And when I teach the Olympic lifts to others, I have them do it the same way. Now, there’s a delicate balance you have to hit when you’re teaching other lifters to extend onto the toes and then jump their feet into the receiving position. You don’t want them to get excessive with it. I’ve worked with a few lifters who bring their feet too far off the floor during the turnover, almost to the point that it looks like a jump-tuck when they’re pulling themselves under the bar. You don’t want those feet too far in the air because that will cause a little delay-separation moment in the turnover where the athlete is basically floating in space. That’s not good. In my experience, I think athletes will find their own comfortable feel for the movement as they practice it. If you tell them to jump at the top of their pull, they’ll eventually develop a motor pattern that works for them. Some of them will have that dramatic extension/stomp-the-feet technique we see from Vanev, and some will have a more restrained version of the movement. Once you’ve built a concrete knowledge base of what good technique looks like, and you’ve got some experience as a coach, you’ll know when it looks right and when it looks wrong.

That’s how I do it, and I personally think most lifters will learn the movements more effectively if they use toe-extension pulling. Flat-foot pulling? I’ve never taught it to anybody and I don’t know if I would want to try. There’s no denying that it can produce world-class results. I would never say otherwise because there’s plenty of evidence to prove it. From a coaching perspective, I would let an athlete use flat-foot pulling if that’s what they naturally grew into. Good athletes figure out how to use their bodies in the best way. Poor athletes won’t be able to figure anything out. If you coach some of those, then just teach them the best you can and try to get them as far along as possible. If I taught a lifter to extend up on the toes but then, as we continued to practice the lifts, the lifter just started to pull with a flat-foot position, I would let them do it if it looked right. How do you know when it “looks right?” As I said, that’s where experience, research, and a brain full of technical expertise will answer the question. If you’re a competent coach, you’ll know when it looks right, just like you’ll know when it “feels right” as an athlete. But in either case, you have to put in the hours of study and learning. You have to have a model of good technique that’s second nature to you, and you get this through analysis of the best. You have YouTube nowadays, so you have no excuse for not getting the job done in this area.

There’s no one right way. Sometimes I get annoyed when I listen to philosophers, politicians, or religious leaders because it basically seems like most of them are saying, “Only I am right, and everybody else is wrong.” That just doesn’t work for me, because I believe that there is usually more than one solution to a problem. It’s a complex world. All you have to do is watch one world championship and it should be clear to you that there’s more than one way to lift big weights. Your job is to find your own way, the one that’s right for you.