Stop Crossfitting and start getting under the bar. Seriously. Crossfit is awesome, but one of the things that happens when you do a ton of reps at almost no weight is that your form will degrade rapidly and without punishment. What I mean by this is that when you are doing your cleans at 135, you will almost never miss. Therefore there is no feedback that will motivate you to improve technique. Will better technique increase your speed, probably but that is a long term motivation that does not tend to cause a change.

I’m going to pick on transitioning to move under the bar as today’s problem. What does this mean? Transitioning under the bar is the process of finishing the 2nd pull (upward movement) and transitioning to the 3rd pull (downward movement). Crossfiters often do not display any ability to transition under the bar. Their cleans are pulled almost to standing shoulder height, received, and then followed by a quarter squat so that everybody can see it was a power clean. Yay! You can lift a bar a bunch of times. Unfortunately this means that when you attempt to do a full clean (or snatch) the ability to stop pulling at the right time and start moving under the bar has not been trained. In fact you have trained a movement that is counter to this.

What does this mean? It means that you will often see failures that happen when an athlete attempts to rack the bar at their standing height and then ride it down. Spoiler alert! This can’t happen at a heavy weight. What usually happens is that the second pull turns into an upright row in an attempt to get the bar high enough to rack resulting in a fail. Usually followed by an excuse about how said athlete breathed in gluten/sugar/fast food within the last month. Sorry for the low blow there, but I know you’ve seen it (if you haven’t it was probably you).

How do you fix the problem? Practice. Alright I’ll go into detail. There are alot of ways to fix the problem, many of them correct. I’ll say a few, but this is not intended to be a definitive guide to how to fix transitions. One of the simplest ways is to stop doing the power movements of the Olympic lifts for a few months and only do full versions in all workouts. This may or may not help your transitions depending on how much you focus on technique. A specific drill that may help is a tall clean. For videos and detailed explanations, try Google or better yet find a coach. Basically the tall clean involves standing upright and dropping into the receiving position of a clean. This isolates the transition from the top of the pull (standing) to moving under the bar and ending in the receiving position of the clean.