Evidence Strong
How to train to max out Split Jerk - with coach Marcos Soriano
but normally, if you are a good lifter, you could live more weight during the split jerk because the bar has to displace less. Then it's followed by the pushier and followed by the push press. If you are a good lifter, percentages should be being the split jerk 100% of your maximum performance. Then the pushier is about 95% and the push press is about 88% of your maximum increase to jerk. Hi Marcus, welcome to Evidence Strong Show. It's my pleasure to have you. If you could briefly introduce yourself. Hi Alex, thank you for the invitation. I'm very happy to be here. Well, my name is Marco Soriano. I got a PhD in sports science. I did my doctoral state at the University of Southport where I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Cole Comford, your mom and all the guys from that university. My doctoral thesis is about how to implement weight lifting exercises in sport performance or for athletic performance. However, once you get into weightlifting, you fall in love with weightlifting. So let's stay at the same time with my PhD. I started doing weightlifting myself and I also picked weightlifting. I'm a national weightlifting coach here in Spain and I also collaborate with the national weightlifting federation in Spain. I'm one of these lecturers that teach other trainers or the new weightlifting trainers in Spain. I'm also a senior lecturer in Camilo Hospitala University in Madrid and I'm the former leader of a master in Australian training and neuromuscular performance. So my recent line is about the strain training and how to implement different methods to increase neuromuscular performance and improving neuromuscular performance but specifically what I really love is weightlifting. That's plenty. So I invited you because you have published two papers looking specifically at overhead movements and dirt and upper and lower body strength and how they compare and correlate to weightlifting performance in split jerk specifically. So the paper we'll be talking about is called how does lower body and upper body strength relate to maximum split jerk performance. But you also published a paper on comparison of one RM performance across push press, push jerk and split jerk. So maybe we will start with overhead exercises and I will ask you how they relate to each other and what you can tell us about them. Nice. I will start from the beginning if you like. Well my aside told you my doctoral thesis is about how to implement weightlifting exercises for performance but specifically I focused on the overhead pressing derivatives and I tell you why. So I used to read what I still read a lot of papers from Dr. Paul Pongfor and Timo Desukomel and Mike Stones and Chata. But I realized at that time that there were many papers about weightlifting, pulling and catching derivatives and there was little focus on weightlifting of a cup pressing derivatives. So let's say that my email to Paul Pongfor at that time was why nobody has studied this. There are new papers about this and then we published this review in sports medicine about the weightlifting of a cup pressing derivatives and it's more related to general sport performance than weightlifters. But after that I realized how important the overhead pressing derivatives were also for weightlifters, right? Because well as you can see in many competitions I think that we all agree that there's not necessarily the most probably the most complex society in weightlifting. However in the clean and jerk there are more failures in the jerk probably because you accumulate the paddock form from the clean but also because the jerk is a difficult movement itself and it has to be trained properly. So we started with this project knowing more about the kinetics, animatics and also the one-armed performance we can weightlifting of a cup pressing derivatives. What we realized at that time that the three exercises commonly implemented as weightlifting of a cup pressing derivatives were the push press, the push air and also the switch air. As we all know the push air and the switch air is to the weight lifter. So here's the my choose which one to perform in competitions and the push press is more like an assistant exercise just to improve your deep, your thrust and everything. So first of all was to know what was the difference between the push press push air and the speed chart in terms of one-armed performance. So in which exercise can I live more low normally because as we know there are outliers but normally if you are a good lifter you could live it more weight during the split jerk because the bar has to be displaced less then it's followed by the push air and followed by the push press. If you are a good lifter or if you are a good lifter so the percentage should be being the split jerk 100 percent of your maximum performance and talking about bridges so how much edges you lift then the push air is about 95 percent something like that and the push press is about 88 percent of your maximum speed jerk. So the point at the time was okay this is correct for weight lifters because they are still full lifters so they train these lifts on a daily basis and they are thought like technical mastery however that's it happen in other populations and then that's why we convert not only the differences between exercises for weight lifters but also we implement cross-speed athletes and also let's say a group of general sporting populations. I remember some of them they were rugby players so they did swimming all their they were volleyball players football players but all of them were competent at performing these exercises we clearly saw how weight lifters could differentiate better between exercises for example for the cross-speed and also for the general sporting population it was quite similar in terms of the water performance to perform a push air or a speed jerk because they were not as skillful as the weight lifters doing that and what that is let's say talking about the differences between exercises and also your technical level your technical mastery who differ and shape between them and then after that we started working with weight lifters and how to improve them so in my class we were training and I remember one friend one of my teammates my teammates he was doing some jerks and he was trying to be classified for the national championship he was very good he actually has a 130 kg in his match and well the clean engine was 145 which was less than the minimum to get classified and we saw that the problem was not the clean the problem was the jerk and we tried basically to deduce why the jerk was so bad so he started doing a lot of jerks jerks jerks jerks their technique but there was one day when we were doing some presses talking overhead presses and I realized that my clean engine for example is only 130 kgs and I realized that this guy that he is able to live 145 so he is stronger than me he could only live in the overhead press 75 kgs which is quite less than me that for example I can live 85 kgs and then I said I think something is wrong I don't know you know their countries but in Spain we are let's say more technically oriented so he was training the jerk technique once and again and again and again and the problem at that time in my opinion it wasn't the the jerk technique I'm telling the jerk technique was quite good it was that he had a deficit on the overhead press so I just told them okay do your training as you are doing it and now I will implement two times per week overhead pressing following this prioritization and well he improved his press from 75 kgs to 90 kgs in 10 weeks in yeah in 10 weeks and he got 155 in a jerk so he got qualified and he actually got a bronze medal in the national champions so at that time for that specific guy we realized that the overhead press strength was really important for the jerk of course I'm not saying that the overhead press strength is more important than your drive than your legs of course the jerk is a movement that you live with your legs however your upper body is important especially because you are holding the barbell overhead so you need to be strong to be able to keep up with that position so after that I decided to to do like a research study with the rest of my teammates and also some other way lifters here in Madrid and that's why we published that paper that's a great story how did you go about training overhead press so you you have written 10-week program twice a week and what did you think that well it was quite simple it was let's say linear pronunciation and linear programming so we started with a high volume less intensity and then we brought us to higher intensity less volume so it was quite quite quite simple because he only needed to improve his press so he had a really high deficit so the deficit was clear so something very very simple very basic food improving and well we also did the same for the rest of our our teammates and I actually wanted to publish a paper about this as well it won't grow and I will explain you why my teammates started doing kind of a study but of course there was an experimental group and a control group so the control group started like realizing that the mates from the experimental group were improving not only in the always good press but also in the year so these guys started training the press so it was like you are no longer than a control group so that's why my my study failed but let's say that they realized how important was to to also train your upper body for improving your performance especially during the split jerk that's why well I didn't get angry at all it was just well it is what it is right but well it was nice it was actually nice to see all my teammates improving and this stuff that's amazing so you didn't stop there so you wanted to know exactly what is the influence of upper body strength and lower body strength on split jerk performance and could we could we talk a little bit about that yeah like well after this we started doing first it was a study that was published in international juvenile sports science and coaching I really like that journal because it's a college friendly journal and it's very straight to the point so well there were I think at that time there were 60 women and 22 women it was really good because we also could get women and in our study straight because my way lifting I way lifting team I think there are more women than men so it's great that well I have access to this sample I just did a simple correlation between the jerk and the overhead press and we realized that this relationship was stronger for men than for women and I remember there was one paper that Mike Stone published at that time and that he showed that women normally had lower relative strength levels in the upper body so well I wanted just to to see this relationship and effectively and men were more correlated to the overhead press for a split jerk performance so after that once we published that paper I said I need a more clear picture or a more complete picture of this so I need to know how the lower body strength also influenced the split jerk I have discussed this with some people I'm not saying that I'm gonna test my one arm during the squat and then when my one arm during the the overhead press to get my split jerk no for that it's better to get the split jerk directly right yeah but those are good two core symptoms of knowing how important is to be a strong for weight leaders because it is not only important that you train your legs because if you see any weightlifting program you will see I don't know it's not or power is not then kill then push press or clean and jerk and then you will see front squat back squat you know like of course you will see let's say the basic leg exercises however sometimes we forget that the upper body is also important and that's why we we completed a second study this time they were only weight lifters because in this first one there were more athletes rather than only weight lifters and in this one we got 20 weight lifters 20 male and 13 women so what we saw at that time was that also the upper body strength and the lower body strength was important for both men and women so our recommendation more than use this equation or regression equation to know your split jerk which can be paid if you want to have let's say a point you know like the some reference a reference point but it's very useful in terms of knowing that maybe you need to train more of your upper body or maybe you need to train more of your lower body or just have a balance between upper and lower body strength exercises okay so I have a question about it the equation is pretty clear there is a number at the beginning and then you have a factor for back squat and factor for overhead press and you get your predicted one rm or split jerk now when you will plug in back squat and overhead press numbers and then you get your jerk and you compare it to your real maximal and one rm split jerk how will you then deduce whether you are lacking in lower body strength or upper body strength that's a good question actually you could play with numbers on exhale just increasing once or well increasing the ones from the back squat or increasing the ones from the overhead press and also you shoot as a strength conditioning coach or as a weightlifting coach you know in what exercise you've got more potential to improve because well maybe if let's say you've got a lot of potential on the overhead press because there are some people that they are very strong however you need to train more of your back squat you need to train more of your squats and it might help you to improve your gear for example it is quite common to see in women especially in women that they are weaker in the upper body than in the lower body so for women maybe not only implemented in overhead press but any exercise for improving the upper body like triceps biceps overhead press so whatever it could be added way to improve to jerk of course i want to say that it has to be appropriately programmed in a training pronunciation so i'm not saying that you need to train your upper body with these complementary exercises or with these assistant exercises for the whole season so there are periods where you can implement these kind of exercises and you need to make sure that you create a strong base and then after that of course the best way to improve your leg is to perform jerks so that's that's that's the truth but we can as a strain on conditioning coaches or as we live in coaches we have also more training tools and we need to be aware of those so that's why we we perform this kind of studies and it helped us and well i hope that more people can use these papers and disinformation to improve their training okay so i think you laid out pretty clear what is the importance of overhead strength could you speak a little bit more about lower body strength and its importance for specifically for split jerk it's obvious for clean because you have to stand it up so you catch it low you have to stand it up it's obvious why back squat strength is important but i think it's a little bit less intuitive for split jerk so could you elaborate on that well there are important papers talking about this i know that uh dr mike stom probably it's a paper i think it was in 2003 it's called the importance of maximum strength in way lifting performance and so i feel that and also there is recently a paper from arfur second association between foundation strain and way lifting exercises in how you train three lifters i actually i did review that paper i really like it and i really enjoy reviewing that paper because it it basically says that the way lifter to perform well in the two lifts it's nuts and the clean under he or she needs to be strong and especially needs to be strong in the lower body so take into account that for example a jerk you have got a dip and a thrust so you need to drive and to transmit all the force to the barbell you need to perform mechanical work so you need to be strong because you will give like a all of this to the barbell you will transmit all of this energy to the barbell just to rise it's high so of course for the jerk for this not for the clean the lower body is the most important well the most important component in terms of how it's going to be to be that's why way lifters they are really strong in the in the lower body but as i said before the upper body is also important to work on right and of course a strength is they have been to apply force but force is a vectorial magnitude so it has direction it has point of application it also have a magnitude so you need to apply your vectors your force force vectors adequately that's why we take our technique and that's why we need to apply the force appropriately in consistencies depending on your anthropometrics and all of this so we need to i don't know how to explain it but press it could be a work on semantics just to put all the definitions that the difference manuals and papers have done for the different basis first goal transition second goal even some of them basically there is a terrible and also to find a way to let's say have a similar factor for everyone i don't know if it could be just looking at the barbell kinetic centinematics or something like that and instead of defining the faces depending on the angles of the knee or the hip just defining the faces depending on the kinetic so kinematics of the barbell we'll see that in the future but i think it's a fascinating research line and what this is in the most of mine talked to me about the that idea and i think it was great and for sure we will enjoy a lot in the future well we will be waiting for the outcomes so when we started this conversation you mentioned that the jack should be trained properly what did you mean well what i meant with with that it was that you won't improve your jack your jack by doing back squat on overhead press so you will improve your jack if you do exercises well or technically oriented for the jack but you need to perform speed jacks you need to perform well i don't know the specific name in english but well you need to perform exercises to improve your deep to improve your drive and improve all of these faces of the of the split jacks so that's where that's my main point so nobody has to misunderstand the paper so the paper just says that for the split jacks important both your upper and your lower body but you won't improve your project for just doing more back squat and more overhead press but what you need to to work on is on your split jerk for sure so that's why when i explain this case with my teammate he was doing a split jacks and he he actually got a good split jerk he is good technically so he needed to be stronger just like that so that's why we we live in coaches and when we are in training on a daily basis we need to observe and we need to make judgments about what's happening in each moment and then how can i implement different stimulus to improve my weight is the performance that was there or that's where i meant okay thank you what is your favorite color my favorite color uh with grace here i would say maybe shield maybe is in blue i think it is maybe blue yeah okay noted i actually made an infographic from your study and i think it's navy blue red and gray so pretty clear um where people can find you if they want to contact you or learn more about your research or follow what you're what you're doing where should they go well they can follow me on instagram is m_a_soryano in 1991 i'm also on twitter is marco's soryano and well they can drop me an email at any time if they read one of these papers my email is there as a corresponding author and i will be happy to respond to any weightlifting culture has any doubt about that or any weightlifter that the just has well some doubts about these papers specifically but if they have also or if they want to chat about a a general idea of weightlifting or a more general concept so for me it would be great because i think that most of our recent questions should be taken from the practice so if some thought comes to me and say look i have this problem what can i do sometimes i might apply an inductive answer but sometimes i would have to say well we need to study this because i can't say that i don't know and i think it's great that sometimes the answer is basically i don't know and that's why science is there just to to make us easier to discover new new new questions and to discover new answers and what is to to improve the way that we train yeah that's the exciting part yes it is thank you so much marco's for your time today and for your knowledge and sharing it with Adam Strong thank you thank you Alice it has been great and well thank you for the invitation [BLANK_AUDIO]