Small changes often mark the inception of dramatic development. Read a
bit more and you'll find your brain to be a most interesting part of
your anatomy. Condition a tad more and you'll be amazed at the lifting
volume you can tolerate.
Try the snatch grip and astonish yourself with
new slabs of back muscle and a better conventional deadlift.
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What's a Snatch Grip?
I know what you're thinking: the snatch grip sounds like a rapidly
executed MMA move that takes a gentleman from zero to unconscious in a
hurry. Actually, it's nothing of the sort.
Based on the gracefully performed Olympic lift, the snatch grip is a wide hand placement on a barbell.
How's it Done?
Hand placement is the first determinant -- how wide do you have to place
your hands? The answer depends on your anatomy. Your arm length governs
hand placement.
Sure, the statement above seems obvious, but in practice people often
set their grip too wide or too narrow when applying a snatch grip.
To be a snatch grip Goldilocks, and find the grip that's just right,
hold your arms out so they are parallel to the ground. From this
position, bend your elbows to ninety degrees. Now, rotate your arms down
so your hands are facing the barbell. Reach your arms straight down to
the barbell. This is your proper snatch grip width.
What's the Point? Why Use it?
What can this grip do for you? It's a fitting question for selecting any
exercise. Choice is always based on the desired outcome, and our
current Olympic-influenced hand clasp serves as an authoritative means
to achieve two frequently desired outcomes: bigger lats and a better
deadlift.
Fashioning Lat Fibers
Want someone to work hard?
Make their job important. Give a
muscle the means to exert effort, a job that's important, and you've
given it a means to grow. A wide hand placement promotes the lats to the
forefront of the deadlift chain of command. In this position, without
extra lat work, the upper-body wilts and the shoulders roll forward.
They have to turn on and do a good job or the body is in trouble. This
important promotion, and subsequent increase in workload, tells the body
that the lats require more girth.
Training Deadlift Tension
Create immense tension and your brain gives your body more neural juice
. More neural yield
produces more strength. It's a lovely event cascade that starts with grabbing the barbell with murderous intent.
Widening that murderous clutch into the snatch position poses a threat
that the conventional grip can't posture. It's the same concept we
discussed in the previous section, Make the lats important and they work
harder to create tension. This tension, however, isn't unilateral in
purpose. It reaches beyond hypertrophy.
The threat posed by snatch grip deadlift variations educates the lats on
creating tension across various situations. When you return to
conventionally gripping the bar you'll have greater tension creation
skills. Create more lat tension and get more from your nervous system,
achieve a better bar path, and deadlift more pounds.
Which Deadlift Variations?
It's damn near impossible
(and certainly unproductive) to
employ a snatch grip while sumo stance deadlifting. Every other
variation, however, is fair game.
Fair game, however, doesn't warrant an arbitrary grip and exercise
selection: the right grip, the right exercise, the right time.
If you're new to snatch grip deadlifting, you're well-served to start
with a rack pull. Set the bar around knee height, set your
anatomy-determined grip, and create violence. It doesn't take long to
get the hang of it. Soon enough you'll create violence from the floor.
Full-range snatch grip deadlifts, and deficit snatch grip deadlifts, are
great for those that need greater tension during their deadlift set-up.
Learn to create tension in an exaggerated bottom position and you'll be
a monster when you return to conventional grip.
Sets? Reps? Miscellany?
How about some logistics.
Fastening the hands far outside the bounds of the normal grip charges
the grip with an exorbitant tax. For this reason, it's best to keep your
reps to five and down. As the grip wears, so wears tension. Without
tautness, our snatch grip efforts are for naught.
Light, tight and fast snatch grip sets are great preceding conventional
deadlift sets; consider them the primer button that sets your nervous
system to high output and prepares your pulling muscles for heavy
lifting. But this versatile grip also produces when applied to auxiliary
deadlift training.
Snatch grip RDLs hammer the entire posterior chain while training
superior stiffness and pulling strength. Place them in the stead of your
other first level deadlift assistance exercise and you've done yourself
a solid.
A Gripping Conclusion
It's amazing what production comes with moving the hands a few inches;
small changes stimulate amazing results. Gap your hands a bit wider on
the barbell and incite a riot of deadlift gains and back growth.
[Editor's Note:
The deadlift is a short-burst, low-rep routine. As such, it requires
high energy and maximum focus. Try these supplementation strategies
before you hit the floor:
BioQuest AndroFury:
Nothing beats the enormous surge of energy you feel when you power up
with a dose of AndroFury 30 minutes before your workout. That's
AndroFury's elite complex of performance maximizers at work. And
AndroFury's state-of-the-art T-boosting key ingredient is aggression
personified!
Mega BCAA:
The deadlift is all about size. Make sure you keep those gains
post-workout with a good dose of the ultimate recovery agent, Mega
BCAA.]
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