Topic: Intermediate-grip overhead squat

[Shaun Le Conte]

Lately I have been lucky if I can train two short sessions a week, and like when I was in Korea I can't do Olympic lifts aside from light power snatch and clean. As a fellow I sometimes train with put it, "there is no margin for error in this gym". There is an OL club but it's not feasible for me to get there most of the time without a major short term investment in transportation.

Anyway, one exercise I have started to do this week is an intermediate grip overhead squat. I figure it's a new challenge that in a small way helps to make up for my complete lack of split or push jerks by keeping my shoulders flexibile and working the stabilizers in both the jerk and snatch.

Has anyone done this exercise with an in-between grip? Seems like fun if nothing else. 50 kg x 5 is all I am up to at this point - just getting used to them. 

[michael cooley]

I train at Spoon Barbell with Gary Deal and other notables, and Richard Flemming (our coach) periodically puts us through the exquisite torture of CLEAN-grip overhead squats.  Frankly, my shoulders have never been healthy enough to stand these for more than a couple of workouts in a row.  Aside from the incredible strain they put on your shoulder flexibility (you'll become flexible or die trying), they pack a kinesthetic wallop.  Because the balance is so different from an overhead squat, you become immediately aware of exactly where the bar is, and where the rest of your body is in relationship to it. 

With all the press lately about how the Chinese lifters include heavy overhead squats (both clean and snatch grip) in their training, perhaps there's more to these than meets the eye.

mpc

[Jim Hooper]

If you are a power/push jerker, they'd be indispensable.

But if you are not, and are not structurally designed to overhead squat with the narrow grip (like Michael and most of us, who might not "die tryin'" but instead would simply develop shoulder impingement), wouldn't the logic amount to doing a movement that you will never do in competition, and that stresses your shoulders, and that therefore may impede the intensity or quality of your training in the lifts that you actually will do in competition?

To each his own, and whatever works, more power to 'em.  (Assuming one knows, in fact, that a novel training exercise actually does improve results, which, in my experience, is almost never demonstrated for the latest or weirdest fad lifts.)  I just don't know what difference it makes that some new or different movement "packs a kinesthetic wallop."  Lots of things, I suppose, pack a kinesthetic wallop.  But will they increase a lifters' snatch or jerk?  If not, they offer only perhaps fun (nothing wrong with that), but they certainly drain training resources (e.g., time, energy, longer recovery interval, injury risk associated with unfamiliar movements) away from the movements that are known to produce higher competition results.

[Shaun Le Conte]

If you are a power/push jerker, they'd be indispensable.

But if you are not, and are not structurally designed to overhead squat with the narrow grip (like Michael and most of us, who might not "die tryin'" but instead would simply develop shoulder impingement), wouldn't the logic amount to doing a movement that you will never do in competition, and that stresses your shoulders, and that therefore may impede the intensity or quality of your training in the lifts that you actually will do in competition?

To each his own, and whatever works, more power to 'em.  (Assuming one knows, in fact, that a novel training exercise actually does improve results, which, in my experience, is almost never demonstrated for the latest or weirdest fad lifts.)  I just don't know what difference it makes that some new or different movement "packs a kinesthetic wallop."  Lots of things, I suppose, pack a kinesthetic wallop.  But will they increase a lifters' snatch or jerk?  If not, they offer only perhaps fun (nothing wrong with that), but they certainly drain training resources (e.g., time, energy, longer recovery interval, injury risk associated with unfamiliar movements) away from the movements that are known to produce higher competition results.

In my case I am not using a clean grip. What I am using is a very narrow snatch grip, or a very wide jerk grip (think Vencelas Dabaya). I am training in a power rack where the pins are always in the way of where I would put my hands for a snatch grip. I don't move my hands out consistently after removing the bar from the rack so I narrowed my grip to be within the rack's width.

I can't snatch or clean & jerk so this overhead squat with a narrower grip won't actually "impede the intensity or quality of (my) training in the lifts that (I) actually will do in competition."

[Ryan Marciniszyn]

I've used it a couple of times when my shoulders were a little sore, so I didn't want to put extra stress on them by using my snatch grip.