Anonymous Asks: I am trying to learn a new skill that is giving me all sorts of problems. Over the last few months I have been working on increasing my shoulder range of motion so that I can get my arms "back" into a good overhead position. At the same time I have been working hard on my front squat. Not so much in trying to lift heavy, but to groove the movement down so I don't fall forward at the bottom.

I thought I had made progress in both areas until I tried something real simple... Get into a bottom squat position and try to press up some light kettlebells. In the bottom position I could barely get my arms overhead. My arms come forward and I feel "stuck" mid range. It almost feels like my scapulae don't want to rotate. With this lack of ROM and stability, there is no way I will ever be able to load beyond PVC pipe.

How often do you see this with new lifters? What drills can I start doing to get past this?

I am patient, and will spend the extra time to get beyond this. I spent a year retooling my dead lift so I would no longer trash my back, and this is next on my list. Thanks for any help you can offer.

Greg Says: Trying to press KBs from the bottom of a squat is not necessarily a good measure of your overhead squat progress. With the arms independent, you have to press straight up, which means the shoulders are being asked to open more than they would need to in a typical wide-grip barbell overhead squat. So if you’re still working on that wide-grip overhead squat position, a 2-arm KB or DB overhead squat or Sots press is well beyond what you should expect to be able to do at present.

I’m a proponent of the shotgun approach to flexibility cases like this where I can’t see what exactly is happening—do every stretch you can think of as much as possible. As you progress, you’ll feel which ones seem to help and you can start dropping the ones that aren’t contributing as much. Definitely spend time on scapular mobility and stability (mainly strengthening your ability to retract and depress the scapulae). Some good exercises for this are band pull-downs (video here), ring rows done properly, and scapular depression/retraction while hanging from a pull-up bar (use a fairly wide grip).

Don’t forget to consider upper back, hip and ankle flexibility—if you feel you have good ROM and stability when standing, but lose it when squatting, at least some of it is coming out of your hips and ankles. If you can’t sit into a proper upright squat, you can’t expect to achieve a sound overhead position for the Olympic lifts.

Anonymous Asks: Greg or Aimee, I was wondering if you could speak to how the feel of the classical lifts seems to change as the bar weight approaches and goes beyond body weight, as I just found out today while cleaning. Here's what I mean. I am a powerlifter who is trying to transition into Oly lifting, so my base of strength is good. When it comes to cleaning I have found that I can power clean more than I can squat clean, which is only about 80% of my BW. The issue here is clearly getting under the bar, and to be honest there is a lot of fear involved when dropping under substantial weight, even though I know I'm strong enough to handle it. So I've been doing a lot of hang cleans with about 55%-60% BW and I can receive the bar fairly solidly in the hole, which is a huge confidence builder.

Today I was power cleaning and feeling really good, so I decided to test my max. I did triples up to 60% BW, then singles in increments of 10lbs. I just found that as the bar started approaching my body weight, the whole feel of the lift changed and not just the perception of heaviness. I tried to keep my mechanics the same, and was I achieving more than sufficient bar height to get under the bar in a power position, but I had a lot of misses. I finally topped out at 98% BW, which I caught somewhat sloppily just under parallel and which buried me, but I did manage to stand up with it. What struck me on this final lift was that all the technique work in the world didn't prepare me for the "feel" of taking a bar close to my own weight through the second pull and catching it in the hole. I can only imagine that as the bar gets heavier than the lifter the leverage shifts which might be causing this different feel. Is this a real consideration or do I just have to get used to lifting heavier?

Greg Says: I suspect that what’s happening is that your balance during the lift is forward at all weights and you simply aren’t aware of it when the weights are light because they’re not heavy enough to influence your position and balance further. That is, with 50% of your bodyweight, you can do just about anything and get away with it—an errant bar is easy to pull back to you later in the lift because your own bodyweight is enough to remain the anchor in the system. As the bar approaches your own weight, it has just as much control over you as you do over it. In this case, the errant bar pulls you out of position and you’re unable to simply muscle it back into place as needed later.

Another possibility (which could be occurring together with the previous) is that your mechanics are in fact changing as the weight increases. Most likely, this would be your hips moving up faster than your shoulders as you lift the bar from the floor. As a powerlifter, it’s very likely that you’re posterior-chain dominant, which means that it will be hard for you to open your knee joint from a small angle because your quads are relatively weak. The body will shift the work to whatever is strongest, and in such a case, it does this by opening the knee without opening the hip to create a larger knee angle without moving the weight very much. This then puts the knee at a larger angle that the quads can continue opening under the full load and transfers more of the weight to the strong hip extensors. This can have two effects that will cause you a lot of trouble and certainly change the feel of the lift: shift your weight forward farther over your feet, and increase the moment arm on the hip. The first makes it impossible to finish your pull properly and forces you to chase the bar forward rather than being able to move it up and yourself down. The second makes the extension of the hips more difficult and consequently slower, making it tougher to get the quick explosion at the top of the pull that you need to have a chance to get under the bar.

Perform snatch and clean deadlifts and halting deadlifts with no more weight than what allows you to keep the proper upright posture. Focus on pushing with the legs to move the bar up to the thighs and shifting back toward your heels and staying there all the way to the top. This will not only train you in terms of skill to pull correctly, but will begin to strengthen you in the proper posture. Remember that as the weight increases, your body will always revert to the positions in which it’s strongest. You can also combine halting deadlifts with snatches and cleans in a number of ways. The simplest is to perform 1-3 halting deadlifts followed by a snatch or clean. Another is to perform the halting deadlift and rather than returning to the floor, performing the snatch or clean straight from the paused position. This can work really well, but I will usually have a lifter follow a rep like this with a normal rep from the floor to help prevent them from developing a habit of pausing during a lift or hitching.

Finally, more front squats for the clean and overhead squats for the snatch will strengthen the positions and boost your confidence.