Have you ever watched weightlifting events during the Olympic Games? The first lift that athletes must complete is the "snatch." This involves picking a heavy weight up off the floor and lifting it, ending in a standing position with the weight overhead.
The weight cannot be "pushed" with the arms or shoulders, so the hips and legs are used to "throw" the weight and to duck underneath the bar and drive it up, in order to end in the standing position.
As you can imagine, this is a very complicated procedure!
It is also a ballistic action; you can't stop and think your way through it because every part of the lift needs to be completed perfectly, in the correct order, as explosively as possible. Any weak link or lost energy will result in the athlete failing to do the lift.
Coach Dan John teaches young athletes to compete in discus events. He uses the Olympic lifts to build explosive strength in these athletes. In a relatively short space of time, Coach Dan John teaches his athletes to both throw and to lift. That's a lot to teach! Neither activity is simple.
In this video, Coach Dan John is teaching other coaches and trainers how to teach the snatch. It's a long video, 50 minutes in length, so I suggest that you fast forward to 31:00 (unless you want to learn how to snatch or coach Olympic lifts yourself), and then fast forward to 43:45.
This practical application is a good example of learning theory in the training of human subjects to perform complex physical tasks. See if you can spot:
—Splitting (instead of Lumping)
—Targeting
—Cueing
—Chaining
—Modeling
Each tiny piece of the lift is taught to fluency with a piece of PVC pipe instead of a weighted bar, and then put on cue. Then the tiny little pieces are chained together, and the cues faded. It's a very efficient system, and I would bet it saves a lot of injuries too!
