Third and Last Part of Coach Zhang's Chinese Weightlifting training camp experience aka Dead Muscles in China.
Internal vs external shoulder rotation
Coach had no idea why anyone would ever externally rotate. When someone mentioned externally rotating overhead, he stuck one of his arms out overhead rotated outward to try out what we meant, shook his head, and mimed an average Instagram bench press-style jerk. All he had to say was “no no.”
We had to press him a little further as to why he thought so and he mentioned that loading the shoulders in the jerk is much more injurious than loading the upper back.
“Internal rotation overhead means you can stick the bar farther behind and have your back musculature take on some of the load.”
It made sense, and all the crisp lockouts from the Chinese lifters we saw had the bar behind the ears.
Interesting piece of trivia
Coach seemed to believe that Americans were still teaching external rotation overhead because that’s a technique for the press, and the last time Americans were winning was the 60s when the press was still a movement.
“Under heavy criticism, leading internet sources had to shift from promoting external rotation to more vague language: neutral rotation, or between external and internal, or it depends on the lifter... ”
Few words advice on jerk footwork
After overhead rotation, the biggest takeaway about jerk technique was footwork. The first thing is all of us are stomping too hard.
Any stomp that is loud is too physically jarring for stability overhead. Every lifter who watched us would try and get us to shuffle our feet out.
Feet make little sound.
The second is that all of us have absolute shit precision.
“It’s not even the case that we’re consistently making the same mistake; our mistakes aren’t even consistent. ”
He recommended many, many reps with just the bar and the following framework:
- Hips and bar travel in one line upward and do not move backward or forward in the catch.
- No forward or backward lean (typically caused by mistake mentioned right above.)
- Hips should be centered under shoulders with the traps up by the ears and bar above the traps.
- Legs should be traveling in a straight line forward and back.
Watch Coach Ma Laiyang reinforcing technique:
Bonus: watch clean and jerk technique of 12 year girl in the front.
After adding weight, hold every jerk in the split for about two seconds.
The dip - first opportunity to screw up
Last thing was about the dip. We need to load the lower back in the dip too. Pretty straightforward. We also generally need to narrow our stance in the dip.
Most importantly, we are all dipping way too fast. Our dips have to be controlled so that we can focus on the drive as its own entity, not just as a reaction to a fast dip.