Adarq.org

soo if my front squat is near 320 and my bw is at 170 were do you think my vertical and my snatch should be? i think my vertical is not correlating with my strength at all, im 5 10 and my standing vertical is around 25 inches

  

There really is no great relationship where front squat X == vertical jump Y.  Honestly, I'd be surprised if somebody who can front squat almost double body weight can only jump 25 inches and I'd assume that 320 pound front squat is a little high.... but stranger things have happened.  

What's important is how improvements to your front squat correlate with improvements to your vertical. You might be doing everything right but just have the most awesome leverages for squatting and poor jumping genetics.  However, if your front squat was once 250 and you weighed 170 and your vertical was also 25 inches, then something is wrong and you fall into the class of people who are not able to translate their strength in the squat to vertical jumping.

If you really want my guess, I'd assume someone fronting squatting close to 2x bodyweight would jump a minimum of 30+ inches.  Snatching is hard to estimate because if you have never done it your won't be very good.  However, I'd estimate your full clean should be approximately your 3 rep max in the squat (maybe around 300?) and your hang clean should be around 85% of your full clean (so about 260 lbs?).  Again the snatch is around 80% of the clean and jerk so.... If you are technically proficient then somewhere around 200 lbs?  All these numbers are just ballpark estimates that coaches use to move between lifts, and I applied ratios from full lifts to hang versions, so no telling how off I am.  That said, I think a ball park 200 lb hang snatch doesn't sound too off for someone who front squats 320.  

I disagree about full clean being ~ max. triple squat. If that is the case, then squat = too weak.

But I agree that the range of these relationships is quite huge. It heavily depends on the individual and training methodology (for example the above ratio, which is one that surely exists in the real world, even if it should not).

@rusi: You really front squat 320?

I also thought cleaning your max triple was a little aggressive, but I assumed it was closer to being true for olympic lifters
who have extremely efficient second pulls and bounce out of the whole really well.   I actually got the triple front squat == clean rule from Dan Johns book. 

He talks about it in this article, a good read:

http://danjohn.net/2009/12/the-front-squat/

Good discussion

@Todday

It's a good point about tracking barbell jumps of squat jumps. With jump squats I can fairly easily tell if I have improved by the ease at which I amortize in the 1/2 squat position. Videos also help. With the barbell jumps daniel demonstrates, I agree though it is not easy to track improvement. But with power cleans and snatches, it's also tricky, you can flex at the hip more and go deeper into a squat in order to hit a new PR for instance, this is analogous to jumping lower in a jump squat and calling it a PR.


@steven-miller
The abstract was vague indeed. But it had to be because to explain their results would have taken up a few extra sentences. Although the authors are not concerned with what we are concerned with, you can interpret the study differently than they do, and conclude the jump squats result in more power output than the power cleans do.

A note on the isolated body power: the reason it was triple with the unweighted jumps is because they looked at the sacrum, obviously the sacrum will have the highest velocity during a jump with no external resistance. It's not to conclude that body weight jumps are the best way to go I agree. But it does tell us that heavy squats do are not a power exercise, but one to improve force production. If you only perform squats in your jump training you won't optimize your success.

If we lok at just bar power though, the jump squat peak bar power occurred at 80%1RM, with 2527W, and 2145W at 90%1RM in the power clean. So not as much of a difference there.


The other study I referenced found similar values in power output int he jump squat and hang clean, slightly higher in the jump squat. Still measuring power output does not tell us everything. The EMG studies would. I would suspect that jump squats would have more quad involvment.

What about back squatting or a more posterior chain dominant exercise like low bar back squats or deadlifts?

After thinking about it, I do not agree anymore that jump squats are more quad-dominant. I do not disagree either, though. I would like someone to explain to me what quad-dominance is, what it means and how it can be measured. I realized that I am not really sure about those things and I would like those who regularly bring/brought this up (AlexV, Avishek, adarq, Raptor,...) to explain this to me. My former agreement was stupid.

Right^^^

I've seen increases as much as ~50 cm total in my 3 consecutive 2-leg bounds after doing heavy hang powersnatches.

Without doing the hang powersnatches I was jumping ~7.80m and after doing heavy (for me that was 45-50 kg) hang powersnatches I set a new PR with 8.40m and IT REALLY FELT different as far as movement was concerned (like I was feeling I was jumping more "correctly", with more power coming from the hips/hips moving back to initiate the jumps vs power coming from the quads/knees going forward to load the quads to initiate the movement).

Well quad dominance is how much load an exercise TENDS to make your body use as far as the quads are concerned. A high bar squat has the potential to make you use more knee bend/knee going forward than a low bar squat has (also depending on your structure) and will make you kind of "wanting to use the quads/go with knees forward" more. That's my understanding of quad dominance.

You can also feel it in the amount of overload happening in your quads as you perform that exercise.

Quote from: Raptor on January 25, 2012, 02:01:09 pm

Well quad dominance is how much load an exercise TENDS to make your body use as far as the quads are concerned.

I do not understand this sentence. Can you explain this? I suppose quad dominance is not the same as potential knee flexion in an exercise?

Yeah, I think you can say that. At least in my version of the definition. So for me personally, that's pretty much the same - the potential of knee flexion and quad loading of a given exercise. Of course it's more a matter of that knee flexion/quad loading actually occuring than the potential of that since that's what we really care about.