What was your best powersnatch back then Gary and at what bodyweight was that?
Not really sure. I weighed about 80 kilos when I was seriously pursuing higher classic lift numbers last year. I got my best snatch to 74 kilos at the time. My technique wasn't the most efficient and I was slooooooow (22" vertical) so my power snatch wasn't that much lower, maybe 70 kilos or so. I could probably power snatch 135 lbs right now without too much trouble and maybe 145.
Thanks for responding. My thoughts are that improving the full snatch might not be the best training tool for other athletic activities besides weightlifting. The power snatch is superior for jumping because power output is higher since you have to accelerate the bar to a greater height and catching the weight in a high position can supposedly act similarly to performing weighted plyometrics.
IMO there is no recipe against being slow except to get stronger and train explosively with exercises such as the powersnatch. Performing jumps and planning for them in your training schedule (meaning: program them!) is terribly important as well if increasing jumping is the goal. I see nothing wrong with including bands or weight vests for jump training but would suggest that this should be done supplementary to one or two explosive
lifts. So you could perform weighted jumps or jumps with bands together with powersnatches on one day. On another day you would do powercleans and sets of unweighted jumps.
The reason is, that I see training with bands or powerjumper much more like real jump training in comparison to general training for explosiveness. Obviously there is no clear cut line separating the two but in terms of similarity (of speed and movement) this should be intuitive. On the continuum from strength to speed it would make sense for people other than beginners to include a greater variety of exercises between squats and jumps. The greater the resistance, the more similarity there is to the full squat in terms of movement speed. The lower the resistance, the closer an exercise resembles a real jump. I suggest that for people, that see no improvement of jump height following a substantial increase in the squat, other exercises should be included and improved upon beginning with those that are more on the strength side of the continuum. So for such a trainee the first thing that would need to be introduced is the powerclean. Eventually a variation of the powersnatch should be added and jumping with bands and forms of plyometric training come thereafter. Thereby the gap between the exercise that is trained and improved upon to the vertical jump becomes smaller with every addition. This would, theoretically, lead to an improvement in jump height eventually. Following the logical guideline that one should not do more than what is necessary, I oppose the trend in performance training to unsystematically throw every kind of exercise variation on a trainee in the hopes that one or the other exercise will help eventually. So in my opinion, after squats and jumps alone don't cut it anymore one would introduce the powerclean and only the powerclean, get substantially better in those and see what happens to the jump. Improvements will dry out and step by step more exercises can be introduced and some might replace others. What I wrote is hypothetical so far and should not be taken as fact. But it is at least a model that can be validated and could function as a guideline of exercise selection for beginner and intermediate trainees.
