Sunday 25 January 2009

Sunday's Snatch question

I read this post a while back and I have been thinking about how it relates to weightlifting. Here is a post from Ross Enamait's blog:

Dr. Bradley, M.D., suggests the following:

“To perform any physical feat with grace and dexterity, the human being must practice and practice to achieve relaxation of uninvolved muscles. Such simple acts as running, jumping, even walking, are instinctively performed gracefully and automatically by nonhuman animals. Grace in physical action is a result of ability to keep the uninvolved muscles relaxed, and economy of muscular action. This does not mean we human beings cannot achieve physical feats similar to those of animals. It means, rather, that we must recognize the human need for practice and physical conditioning of our muscles in the apparent absence of human instinct.”

The question is this: how relaxed should the uninvolved muscles be in the Snatch? Now, when one is in the zone or in their flow state, all this happens naturally and one does not have to think about it. However, this is not always the case, particularly in training. Here is a video of Rigert's Snatch and below it is Dimas's Snatch. I will let the viewer guess which Snatch was performed with grace and which one has muscle tension written all over it. Is there an optimal state of muscle tension or is it all dependent on the individual's physical and mental makeup?

1 comments:

Laura Nolan said...

This issue of relaxation of uninvolved muscles is a complex one for the snatch and C+J from what I understand. The problem is that each muscle group is involved in only certain phases of the lifts and should be relaxed at other phases. This is supposed to be a major reason why lifters get more efficient the more they train.

Personally I find it hardest to relax going for heavy (for me) lifts so there's clearly psychology at work here too.

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