Today, we are continuing what we started in Part 1 of the series.
What cues do Chinese coaches use for dip and drive?
Cueing is an interesting thing to write about in a vacuum.
Chinese coaches will adapt their cues and generate completely novel ones for each individual athlete, depending on they are capable of internalizing. Moreover, you may already know that what sets good technical coaches apart is not their super sweet secret cues--they are often pretty generic, actually--but their willingness to stay with an athlete and drill their positions until they are perfect, often with non-verbal physical manipulation. So this is to say that we can't really list a bunch of fancy cues and expect them to be helpful.
Please watch a quick video below that shows practical application in Chinese weightlifting, and visually answers the last question from today’s blog post.
Lu Li Qi is one of the best professional coaches on the face of the earth. At the same time, nobody knows she even exists. Marketing is the king of weightlifting coaching these days.
However, we can give you a sense of what most Chinese coaches look for in the dip/drive:
1. Lower back tightness
2. Tightness between the shoulder blades
3. Breathing
4. Head stays back, chin tucked down
5. Balance towards the ball of the foot
6. Rhythm of the dip (smooth but short acceleration into the bottom)
7. Completely vertical torso throughout the dip and drive
8. Complete extension before splitting (or squatting)
To achieve any of these with a given athlete, you may have to get creative as a coach. The vertical torso in the dip and drive in our experience is the most difficult to master for amateur athletes, followed by the rhythm of the dip.
“We’ve found that the best ways to work on these aspects of the jerk simply involve a lot of silent drilling in front of a mirror, without much cueing beyond the initial explanations.”
How many degrees should the back and front foot be internally rotated?
There is going to be some variance between schools and individual coaches on this matter, but for the most part the feet are taught to land straight without any rotation. If the back foot land with external rotation, the athlete receives correction, but if they land with a small degree (~5-10 degrees) of internal rotation, the coach will often let it slide.
The reasoning for the straight feet mostly involves preventing the knee collapse or instability that comes with excessive rotation.
From speaking to coaches, this is more of a minor point.
Front foot hitting floor first, back foot first, or both at same time in split?
Same time.
In slow motion videos, you will see that good heavy jerks sometimes have the back foot land first. However, the time discrepancy between the back foot and front foot landing is so small that intentionally teaching a back-foot-first jerk will increase this discrepancy and throw off the timing (assuming that back foot first is even the correct way to do it?)
As with most modern Chinese coaches, we teach a simultaneous planting.
Should the intent be to to send barbell straight vertically, or slightly backwards behind the head?
The intention should be a vertical path. However, this is another question where the intention of teaching is slightly different than the end result in practice.
The bar does need to go from the front rack position to a position over the traps, so there may seem to be a necessity for a very small backward displacement of the bar. At the same time, even the most technically precise lifters catch the jerk with a very small amount of forward torso displacement and/or lean.
Between these two factors, the net horizontal displacement should be imperceptible.
Watch the video from the beginning of the article again - the barbell definitely goes too far back.
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