The snatch is one of two lifts executed in Olympic Weightlifting competitions (along with the clean and jerk.) It’s a power-based movement, meaning you need both speed and strength to perform it. It requires a lot of practice, but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll feel like a pro lifter, and you’ll look like one too.

Luckily for you, we’ve got GB weightlifter and British Champion Noorin Gulam to explain how to perform the snatch and give you some top tips on how to improve your technique.

In this article we’re going to break down the snatch into different components to help you master the technique. Try performing 3-5 sets of 5 repetitions of each movement. When you’re comfortable with each part of the lift you can bring them together into one smooth movement.

Top Snatch Tips

• Keep the Bar close to your body at all times

• As you draw from the floor, you want to make sure your knees aren’t getting in the way

• You want the bar path to be as straight as possible

• Think of the snatch as a leg movement, so think about pushing the floor away and not using your arms to draw the bar up.

Overhead Squats

First things first we’re going to start in an overhead squat. Take the bar in a snatch grip (that’s a wide grip), you’ve got two lines on the bar that demonstrate the grip. You’re going to hold the bar at the furthest ones out, pick the bar up and place it over your head. From here you’re going to squat down.

Snatch Balance

The snatch balance consists of taking the bar from your shoulders, over your head and jumping out into a squat position.

Hip Snatch

Now you’re comfortable with jumping, squatting out and punching the bar above your head, we are going to begin practising performing the snatch from the hips. Starting with a snatch grip, we’re going to take the bar from our hips, slightly bent in the knee. We’ll extend our body and jump underneath it.

The focus with a hip snatch is triple extension. Triple extension is extension of your ankles, knees, and hips. How we get this extension is by drawing our shoulders to our ears to really extend the body up. You want to be thinking about getting your elbows to your ears and driving your elbows to the sky.

Hang Position

Next, we want to take the bar in a hang position. A hang position is anywhere where a bar is not taken from the floor. So, you pick up the bar and draw it down to above the knee hang position, follow through the extension, and jump underneath the bar.

Snatch From the Floor

Now we can take the bar from the floor. You can put technique plates on the bar so you can find your start position. Remembering that the snatch is a wider grip, you want to place your arms out to the side of you, just over where the bar is. Feet need to be tucked underneath the bar and the bar needs to be in line with the top of your shoelace. As you come down, you want your shoulders and your armpit to be in line with the bar, so your shoulders are slightly over it.

One simple technique tip for starting the snatch from the floor is taking your arms out wide and squat down towards the bar until you reach the wide grip lines, then you’re ready to start your snatch.

Improving Your Snatch Mobility

You’re going to need a lot of mobility to form a perfect snatch. You need to focus on shoulder mobility, your thoracic mobility (upper spine), external hip rotation mobility, drawing your knees away from your body. You need to be mobile in your hips in order to get those really deep squat positions that you need for the snatch. 

Sometimes, spending just 5-10 minutes at the start or the end of the day working on your mobility is going to help massively. Some great mobility exercises include -

• Gorilla squats

• Cossack squats

• Banded dislocates

• Runner's lunge

But the most important thing is that you have fun. It’s going to take time to master the snatch, so keep going, keep failing and enjoy your lifts.

Written by guest author Eryn Barber.

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Tags: Equipment > Bars & Weight Plates ; Exercise Type > Strength