Former World’s Strongest Man winner Eddie Hall has taken on all manner of training challenges lately, from timbersports to professional wrestling. In the most recent video on his YouTube video, Hall meets up with professional strongwoman Chloe Brennan to try his hand at Olympic lifting.
Unlike powerlifting, where the three staple moves (deadlift, squat and bench press) rely primarily on strength, the two core Olympic lifts (the snatch and the clean and jerk) are driven more by explosive power and technique.
Using an empty bar, Hall works up to the two main events with a series of progressions, starting out with an overhead squat, which he says is “harder than it looks.” From there he attempts the hip snatch, driving the bar up from waist height to overhead in one single movement, lowering the starting point of the exercise until he is ready to try the snatch from the ground.
“You want to really pull your shoulders back, keep your arms relaxed,” says Brennan, advising that he can take the move fairly slowly to begin with, as all of the explosiveness is in the upper half of the rep.
Hall executes the move with good form, and adds progressively more weight to the bar. Brennan’s PR on the snatch is 132 pounds, and Hall sets himself the challenge of beating that, eventually managing 176 pounds before deciding that’s enough for his first try. “It’s not about the strength,” he says, noting that the core stability required is considerable.
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Next up is the clean and jerk, where Brennan shares some more technique advice with Hall. “If you’ve got a massive gap between your hands and your shoulders, the amount of power you lose in that little gap there is insane,” she says, explaining that if you’re able to close that gap, you can drive power straight from your feet upwards through your body.
After struggling with his mobility on repeated attempts, Hall eventually concludes that cleaning the bar is “a big ask,” and so he focuses solely on achieving the jerk portion of the exercise.
“It’s safe to say, it’s not for me,” he says. “The clean and jerk, I think I could work at that for a very, very long time and not get anywhere.”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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