What I've Learnt from Snatching

It’s funny. You look at something that someone makes look simple and you think gee, that must be pretty easy. Then you try it and... yeah nah. It often doesn’t matter what the particular skill is, be it cooking or painting or, for that matter weightlifting. 

About 9 months ago I took up CrossFit (yup, full disclosure, I’m one of ‘them’). I thought I was strong. I thought I could be a bit of a superstar with heavy weights because, well, I was strong(ish). Then my coach introduced us to snatches. 

To the uninitiated, a snatch is where you pick up a barbell, and in one movement, move it from the ground to an overhead position with your arms and legs fully extended (well, you actually drop into the squat position first). Of course I’d watched weightlifting competitions screened during the Olympics and as someone with an untrained eye, all I noticed was a large and powerful human being chalking up their hands, huffing, grunting, and then throwing an insane amount of weight overhead. 

When I first tried it, it was almost comical. Turns out while it helps to be strong, the snatch is very much about technique, of which I had none, and completely counter-intuitively, while I thought the premise of weightlifting was, well, to lift the weight, it turns out I was wrong. 

Turns out you only really lift, or, more appropriately, pull, the bar up to just around your chest height. From there, the beginner intuitively tries to ‘muscle’ the bar overhead, where the real lifters actually very quickly ‘drop’ under the bar, before standing up. 

Wait, what? This made no sense to me, and in fact took me a few months to get my head round. When I did get it though, the snatch very quickly became my favourite of all the lifts. It is so technical and so easy to mess up that you have to be switched on 100% or you either miss the lift or get hurt. Sometimes both. 

About a month into learning to snatch I was incredibly frustrated with my progress. I was working really hard but I wasn’t making a lot of progress. I found out that to do it right, the bulk of my strength needed to be, not in my arms or shoulders, but in my glutes and legs. Again this made no sense. But I had to go back to basics, build my skills, lose the ego, ask questions, be prepared to listen, listen, practice, practice and practice. I also had to be prepared to look stupid. Nothing quite like missing a snatch, getting spat out onto your bum and having everyone turn to look to help you lose any ego you may have. 

Why is this relevant?

As I started to get the hang of it I started to see parallels with my professional life. I am naturally the sort of person who will look at something and say,”yeah, I can do that”, even if I am not totally sure how to. I always back myself to figure out a way. The old, "I can do this" chestnut.

However, ego is a terrible thing. And despite my best efforts, sometimes I do find it hard to ask for help. I do find it hard to say “hey, I don’t understand this, can you show me?” Especially as you climb the corporate ladder, so to speak, it does become hard to say you don’t know something. It’s probably one of the biggest mistakes new managers make - thinking that they need to be the smartest people in the room, or that they need to be able to 'fix' everything - for everyone. 

Like them, I thought “I’m big and strong and I can lift this my way... I don’t need to ask for help”. Wrong. What snatching taught me is that you’re never too old to ask for help and that you can push on in your own way for a long time, but you won’t necessarily get anywhere. Just the force of will to make something happen isn't always enough. Sometimes you do need to ask for help.  And when you do ask for help, and listen, things get a lot easier.

To further emphasise my point, the first time I really stopped to listen - and I mean really listen - it wasn’t my coach who was giving me advice, but one of the other members at my box. Just one of the 6am ladies. 

Before you start thinking I’m being a misogynist, I emphasise this only because she’s not a particularly heavy lifter, nor is she very experienced, but she struck me with her words, more or less along the lines of “you know you’ll never really improve much more unless you stop and fix your technique?”

She then demonstrated a lift, with perfect form. And I had to listen, and sheepishly asked "can you show me". 

It’s easy to think we have all the answers. It’s easy to think we don’t need to ask others for help. It’s easy to just keep doing what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s good to stop, listen, and make some changes. Sometimes working harder also isn’t going to work... but working smarter almost always does. 

***

PS. This is my first article in a long, long while. For a long time I shied away from writing for fear my writing would have no significance. But I write, first and foremost, for me - and that's something I forgot. And if by publishing it here helps just one person, then it's worth it. Trolls be damned.