Should Your Workouts Include Heavy Barbell Snatches?
Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink.FIT Head Coach
Other people’s reasons are not your own. All too often I see people make decisions (especially when choosing goals) without deep thought or consideration for their own personal context and the actual life they want to live. In the fitness industry, I see this happening all the time - Everyday people are following workout advice created by sport-specific athletes for performance in exercise sport competitions:
bodybuilders getting ready for a bodybuilding competition who train and eat in a very specific way to have the best possible body composition on a single, specific day for their stage show or photo shoot.
powerlifters who could care less about body composition and only care about 1 rep max strength, while wearing workout gear, in 3 specific exercises, the back squat, the deadlift, and the bench press, on a specific competition date.
Olympic-style weightlifters who only care about 1 rep max strength with workout gear in 2 specific exercises, the snatch and the clean and jerk, on a specific date.
marathon runners who only care about marathon times on a specific date,
CrossFitters who only care about performance in the specific sport of CrossFit on a specific date.
…the list can go on and on.
It’s obvious to me that the strategies that would optimize for these specific exercise sports are not only different from one another, but that likely none of them best fit the goals of everyday people who just want to be active, healthy, fit, pain free, and live amazing lives.
It’s easy to be indoctrinated with sport-specific goals that may not best fit your real goals, especially when you’re surrounded by an exercise sport culture. We should not blindly follow what someone else is doing and should always dig deeper as we learn from everyone and keep everyone’s specific contexts in mind. The remainder of this article’s focus is on the heavy barbell snatch which exists in the sports of Olympic-style weightlifting and CrossFit, but this type of thinking should be applied to every aspect of our lives. The snatch is extremely technical and, for those who compete in CrossFit or Olympic weightlifting, developing and maxing out the barbell snatch is a must. But, is this exercise ideal for anyone else?
Let’s think about every type of professional athlete that incorporates at or near 1 rep max barbell snatches in their training:
Olympic-style Weightlifters
CrossFitters
Football Players
Soccer Players
Volleyball Players
Track and Field Athletes
Marathon Runners
Bodybuilders
Powerlifters
…
I could have listed every type of athlete on the planet and crossed it out, only leaving the competitive weightlifters and CrossFitters who utilize the snatch in their training. Let’s think about that. The only two groups of professional athletes that consistently train the heavy barbell snatch are the only two groups for which that specific exercise is included in their competitions. On the flip side of the snatch, if we looked at what groups utilize the barbell squat, it would include every type of athlete. Even though the squat is not specifically tested in track and field or volleyball, its training utility has meaningful transfer into those sports and therefore is included in most well-balance programs. Those are the types of exercises we want to focus on, the exercises that have high transfer into improving our actual lives, outside of the gym.
If the heavy barbell snatch had utility for optimally improving performance outside of being optimal to improve itself, the exercise would be utilized in the training of at least some other sports where speed and power is at a premium. This is not matter of CrossFitters being ahead of curve in realizing the value of the snatch, but instead an example of sometimes the tail can wag the dog and how the specifics of a test can determine how one prepares for the test. It is clear that if you are tested on the snatch, then the snatch must be a heavy part of your training. To me, it is also clear, that if your life does not require you to be tested in the snatch, there are many more, safer, exercises that can produce the actual results we are looking for. Instead of dedicating all of that time and energy training and perfecting the snatch, it could be put towards other workouts and the snatch could be replaced with other exercises that have almost identical stimuli with less risk (like the clean or the KB Swing).
To exaggerate the example, it makes perfect sense that a kicker in football puts tons of time into kicking field goals because that is the specific thing they need to do in their sport. But, what about everyone else on the field, or those in other sports, or just everyday people? How much time should everyone else spend trying to improve our ability to kick field goals? Probably none.
The Exercise Selection Trap
Once you’ve got your routine in place and start becoming more and more advanced, if you are not proactive, the default is to adopt sport-specific goals as your own. It’s easy, especially when you are part of a CrossFit gym, to lose focus on why you are in the gym. Social media can skew people’s perspectives not only on what exercises are important, but how much exercise is needed as they watch clips of professional or competitive athletes workout. Even some people who have already established an amazing, healthy, holistic exercise habit that is perfectly in line with their goals get pulled off course as they adopt to default goals from exercise sports (like max deadlifts, snatches, marathon times, etc.) that actually make their workouts less optimal for the lives they want to live. Because most people new to a formal exercise program don’t the the time to really think about why they are actually exercising, they default to adopting what they see on social media and around them in the gym.
If you are trying to compete in a sport or an exercise sport, then the answer is extremely different than if you are simply trying to look good, feel good, be healthy, and live a balanced life. I have chosen to remove the heavy barbell snatch from my training because competing in CrossFit is not one of my goals and the amount of time saved and risk eliminated by not focusing on the snatch can be put into other, more effective things.
Even Yoga has these risk / reward trade-offs and a meta analysis of yoga injuries can help further this discussion and line of thinking.
What We Can Learn From Yoga Injuries
Yes, people get injured doing yoga and it’s for the same reasons that people get injured in other workout programs…