Top 5 Exercises to Better Your Snatch

Athletes and CrossFit beginners who become infatuated with weightlifting stand the risk of having their dreams crushed by the snatch lift. Compared to jerk and clean, snatch requires not just precision, but mobility as well. You require perfectly harnessed aggression consisting of maximal effort perfectly timed and channeled into a precise movement.

Lifters are different. They are that who are endowed naturally, and quickly develops consistent and impeccable technique. On the flipside, there are others who struggle and spend quite some time to refine their technique. Some of them finish their lifting careers with lots of dissatisfaction. In order to prevent such a fate from visiting you, below are some assistance CrossFit exercises to perfect your snatch.

Snatch Pull

This is one of the basic strength builders for the snatch. You can adjust your snatch pull to exercise speed or strength and incorporate a considerable number of variations to address your needs as a lifter. Snatch pulls are usually performed with weights of about 90 to 105% of your best snatch. However, such changes depending on your level of development.

The more advanced you are, the lower the snatch weights percentages for pulls because of your greater ability to snatch higher rates of your basic strength capacity. The weights can be kept light if your focus is more on CrossFit training speed or mechanics.

Muscle Snatch

The muscle snatch serves two main purposes; as a drill to teach you the proper mechanics of the third pull and as an exercise to train and strengthen your movement. Whatever the aim, it is important that it is performed accurately to obtain effective results.

You can use the muscle snatch as a technique primer. In this case, you do it with light weights immediately before snatch training to practice and prime the proper pull under the bar. You can also use the muscle snatch as a warm-up couplet which combines with snatches to strengthen and train the turn over while warming up in a snatch session. Lastly, you can do the muscle snatch as a standalone strength exercise done at the end of the workout.

Snatch Balance

This exercise can include three variations which are heaving snatch balance, drop snatch, and the regular old snatch balance. As a group, the snatch balance exercises help in addressing elements of the snatch such as the timing of lockout overhead, receiving position strength, turnover aggression, receiving position precision, footwork, and confidence.

Snatch balances are seen as an advanced variation of the overhead squat. As an advanced lifter, you will find yourself using more of snatch balances than overhead squats during your training cycle. That said, the more common progression is to start with overhead squats and then ease into snatch balances.

Dip Snatch

This exercise can help you train the final aggressive drive of your legs in the pull, proper position, as well as balance in this lift phase. It also plays a key role in helping you practice better bar proximity in your third pull. Equally important, dip snatch is instrumental in correcting overreaching of the hips through the bar as well as practicing better foot transitions from the second to the third pulls.

Apart from the above CrossFit workouts, there is the tall snatch which trains the proper mechanics for the turnover. It is also an excellent exercise to help you train proper movement of your feet.