I’ve got a pretty good recommendation for that. I have it handy just because I had an athlete, an online athlete in that exact situation. Can lift in her garage. She’s got barbells in place but no squat rack.
If you don’t mind, I would like to actually come back to that because I want to talk to weightlifters a little bit more about if they don’t have equipment and what they can do aside from implementing some CrossFit.
Everyone has a broom, or maybe you’ve got a PVC pipe or something that you can hold in your hands that you’re going to be able to mimic that bar with. Surely, everyone has at least something like that.
My recommendation is spend time hanging out in some of these key positions. What are the key positions that are most important, that you can spend some time in, and that you can move in and out of slowly?
With a PVC pipe or with a broomstick, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend moving quickly and doing technique work with that, to be honest with you, just because it’s not realistic enough.
A lot of people struggle enough with mobility that receiving the bar in the front rack, for example, is going to be pretty compensated and we don’t want that to carry through. But you can move slowly through some of these key positions and one is a start position.
Get into your start position, hold it for 5 or 10 seconds, move slowly up through the rest of the deadlift and slowly back down. You can do tempos there as well.
Hang out in the above-knee position, meaning at the level of the broomstick/barbell, at the level of the top of the kneecap. This is an important transition point within the pull of the snatch and the clean and obviously do this with snatch and clean grip.
Spend time there, hold that position for not only 5 seconds. You can hold it for 10, 15 or 20 seconds or you can do an exercise that I call snatch or clean pull-ins where you’re in this position.
You relent your pushback on the bar where the bar comes out and then you push back in and push against your leg so you’re creating some resistance there.
If you have regular equipment, I’ll have athletes do that with a regular bar usually with no weight, but for those that can do it well and are strong enough, we may add even a little bit of weight on there.
For now, your resistance is going to be pushing back against your leg and creating awareness…The biggest thing is awareness, but awareness and strength of pushing back on the bar when you can get back in.
Making sure that that position is good, a few major characteristics we want to see is that the entire foot is grounded. I don’t want you too far on your heels, I want a slight bend in the knee and I want those shins vertical or very close to it.
We’re trying to mimic the position that you ideally want to create when you are doing your heavy snatches or cleans with the bar at that level. Hanging out in those key positions. Another position that I hope is obvious, and maybe it’s not — Dave, you know how much I like the bottom of the squat — is hanging out into the bottom of the squat in some way.
Now, here’s the problem I talked about earlier a little bit with the pull and not really wanting to receive a broomstick necessarily due to mobility. I tell people all the time that an air squat, and therefore holding your bottom position unassisted with no weight, is something that I stay away from with a lot of people because it’s compensated.
I say all the time that an air squat, specifically when we’re talking about getting as low as you can, getting into a bottom position that you want to reinforce, is the hardest variation when it comes to the quality that we want to see. Unless you have really, really good overall mobility, that’s going to be — an air squat in the bottom position — is going to be a tough position for you.
You can easily understand that if you think about how much easier for most people a lightly or medium or even heavily weighted front squat is, position-wise, to get into, and how much better it looks as opposed to an air squat.
What we want to do is spend time, if that’s the case, not only getting into these positions but finding ways to maybe even improve them during this time that we have by doing some mobility work.
Some key areas of needed mobility for your pull are going to be hamstrings, and T-spine, and even hip extension. We can go over some of those maybe quickly here in a minute, and then for the bottom of your squat, the biggest things that you’re going to need to work on are ankle mobility and hip mobility.
Going back to some of the mobility that you can do at home for your pull, and you can do this going back and forth from hanging out in these key positions and the mobility work that we’re talking about — one, you can get in a doorway or just up against the corner of a wall to where, say, if your right leg is up on the wall, your left leg is just to the side of the other edge of that wall. Hopefully, that makes sense. I might have to give them a visual for that.
What you’re doing is, with the right leg up, you’re going to slowly raise your left leg and slowly lower it back down. I like to do 10 reps on each side, but during that, you are making sure that your body is in a position in relation to the wall or the upright that you’re using that will allow for quality.
If your hamstrings are tight, you may not be able to get your butt all the way against the wall. You may have to scoot back away from the wall a little bit to be able to maintain a straight, tight leg on each leg. To do that, you’re going to flex your quads, both quads, throughout, and you’re going to point both toes and do 10 reps on each side.
Then go do some PVC pipe or broomstick Romanian deadlifts or hang out in that above-knee position that we talked about. That’s one of many examples. By the way, this reminds me, Dave, that I’ve also been working on some other programming. We just call it barbell mobility.
My wife and I had been working on it for our entire careers to be honest with you. These are just workouts that we’ve been collecting specifically for the last six months. We’re hoping to put out the programming pretty quickly to the public.
For now what we’re doing is we’re just like Capacity WOD, we’re thumbing through and picking out these workouts that people can do with little to no equipment. That’s one of many examples that we’ll be putting out of a workouts, going back and forth between hamstring mobility and just a simple Romanian deadlift with a broomstick or a bar.
T-spine get something that you can lay over the top of even if you have to bundle up two or three towels to create something similar to a foam roller and just lay over the top of it. You can lay over the top for 60 to 90 seconds and go back and forth between those Romanian deadlifts that we talked about.
Another important one, like I said, is hip extension. For this, I like to get into a launch position, tighten the glutes, tighten the abs down, and push the hips forward until you feel a stretch. If you’re in the right position, it doesn’t take a whole lot for you to feel that stretch.
You can go back and forth between that and say a Cobra pose to help not only open up those hips but keep them flexible so you can use them when you’re extending once you’re able to put more weight back on the bar once again.
For ankles and hips, there’s a lot of different things that we can do but especially at home what are called ankle rocks. You simply get up close to a wall where you can support yourself with your hands. The foot that you’re stretching or the ankle that you’re stretching, that foot is going to be about a foot away from the wall.
All you’re doing, keeping your heel on the ground, is taking your ankle all the way to its end range. I recommend that you look down and make sure that your knee is not directing inside of your toe, that you’re in line with your toes or even exaggerated out.
You’re going to take it to its end range. You’re going to feel shin muscle working to pull into that stretch as much as you can. You’re going to put as much force on it as you can, hold it for two seconds on each rep except for the 10th rep, you’ll hold it for 10 seconds. You can go back and forth between that, holding the bottom of your squat.
If you struggle quality-wise, you can elevate your heels with anything that you can find to allow you to sink to a better, higher-quality position. While you’re at home and while you’ve got the time, over time you can try to progress that elevation down.
You can also assist this position along with elevation by holding anything you can find out in front of you. It’s better if it’s a little bit weighted, but even if it’s a dinner plate or a jug of milk, anything that you can find to hold out front to offset that position and help you reinforce the quality that you want.
The last one we’ll go over, Dave, and I know I’m going over a lot here but for your hips. Usually, when athletes’ hips are tight it has to do with internal hip rotation. What we can do is sit down on the floor, bend your knees at about a 45-degree angle. Your feet are going to be about shoulder-width apart. Your hands are going to be behind you to support.
You’re going to kick say the right foot out first a little bit keeping the butt glued to the floor as much as you can. You’re going to do a windshield wiper with that knee, pushing the knee in, very similar to that ankle rock. You’re going to hold for 2 seconds on each rep and then 10 seconds on the last rep.
Now, when you’re coming out of that stretch on each rep, you’re going to open up your knee as far as you can all the way to the outside just to give a moment of relaxation there and then get back into it, 10 on each side. Again, you can perform that in combination with any squats that you’re doing.
If people will do those types of things, I think that we will limit the allowing our bodies to tighten up [inaudible 27:59] through this time that we have. Again, we don’t know how long it’s going to be.
Also, what I really like and what I really believe is that we may have some athletes that they really do these things on a consistent basis because they’ve not really made theirself focus on it before, they may come out on the other side of this with a little bit more mobility.