Full clean form check

[steven-miller]

Hello Rip,

I recently switched to olympic weightlifting and besides getting stronger devoted a lot of training time to learning the lifts somewhat properly. I asked you for form checks on my powerclean before and you were kind enough to provide valuable advice. By now I feel that I got the main problem - bar going forward at the beginning of the lift - under control.
Yet, racking the bar is still a problem with challenging weights and that is where I want to ask for your advice again.

Full clean with bar trajectory


What I see:

- bar path is fairly vertical up until the point where the second pull happens
- thigh-bar-contact leads to the bar going forward
- I jump backwards, more so with my right leg than the left
- front-squatting the weight up reveals the bar being off balance to the front substantially

Any input, from fellow lifters as well, would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time!

[Mark Rippetoe]

If you didn't jump backwards, the bar would not be off-balance to the front. You're jumping out from under the bar. Stomp your feet out instead. Other than that, the pull is fine.

[steven-miller]

Thank you, good to know that this degree of deviation from vertical is not the problem, but me jumping backwards is. Now I have one problem to solve, not two. I will try the "feet out" cue.

[Jonathon Sullivan]

O,P did you use Dartfish, or some other tracking software? I'm interested in acquiring something like this, and trying to gather info and make comparisons.

Sorry for the sidetrack.

[steven-miller]

Hello Sully,

I really liked your two articles for this site - even more off-topic, but still needed to be said.

The software used was Kinovea, you can download it free from here:
http://www.kinovea.org/en/

[Jonathon Sullivan]

Thanks, and thanks!

[veryhrm]

Hello Sully,

I really liked your two articles for this site - even more off-topic, but still needed to be said.

The software used was Kinovea, you can download it free from here:
http://www.kinovea.org/en/

Dang, i never realized software like this existed as free software. (Though drawing a path on a video is not that difficult of a problem).

I wonder how hard it would be to implement the AutoRip analysis mode. W/ tracks (as a function of time) of bar, knee, hip and "mid-foot" it could theoretically diagnose most gross issues visible in the side view of the squat. (knees/hips not unlocking correctly, knee motion in the bottom half, knee slide at the bottom, depth, lack of hip-drive/GM, lack of bounce, overall speed, verticality of bar path). With enough precision it could even detect knees caving in since knee to hip distance would appear to increase when it otherwise shouldn't. Low back positioning would be hard to measure.

Looks like the way to do it would be to mark the 4 tracks and then to export them for analysis according to a set of rules, but i'm way too lazy and AI class was too long ago.