Snatch

🎯 Quadriceps🏋️ BarbellIntermediateCompoundBiceps (2°)Glutes (2°)Hamstrings (2°)Lower back (2°)Shoulders (2°)Traps (2°)Triceps (2°)

How to do the snatch

  1. Place your feet at a shoulder width stance with the barbell resting right above the connection between the toes and the rest of the foot.
  2. With a palms facing down grip, bend at the knees and keeping the back flat grab the bar using a wider than shoulder width grip. Bring the hips down and make sure that your body drops as if you were going to sit on a chair. This will be your starting position.
  3. Start pushing the floor as if it were a moving platform with your feet and simultaneously start lifting the barbell keeping it close to your legs.
  4. As the bar reaches the middle of your thighs, push the floor with your legs and lift your body to a complete extension in an explosive motion.
  5. Lift your shoulders back in a shrugging movement as you bring the bar up while lifting your elbows out to the side and keeping them above the bar for as long as possible.
  6. Now in a very quick but powerful motion, you have to get your body under the barbell when it has reached a high enough point where it can be controlled and drop while locking your arms and holding the barbell overhead as you assume a squat position.
  7. Finalize the movement by rising up out of the squat position to finish the lift. At the end of the lift both feet should be on line and the arms fully extended holding the barbell overhead.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the quadriceps across the front of the thigh, which straighten the knee and, just as importantly, control it on the way back down.

Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the biceps add force at the elbow; the glutes finish hip extension; the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.

The lower back, shoulders, traps and triceps take a share of the work as well.

Every exercise for:QuadricepsBicepsGlutesHamstringsLower back

How this movement works

The load travels toward you and several joints bend to bring it there. The arms finish work the back starts, so grip and elbow flexors sit in the path of every repetition: when people stall on a compound pull, it is more often the hands giving out than the primary muscle running out of force.

It is filed under olympic weightlifting. The bar must move fast enough for you to get underneath it, which makes this a skill rather than a grind: low repetitions, well short of where fatigue starts editing technique.

What you need

A barbell locks both hands to one bar, so neither side can drift and the load climbs in plate-sized steps. That makes it the simplest way to add weight and the least forgiving thing to bail out of.

Every exercise using:Barbell

These train the quadriceps too, using equipment this one does not:

Difficulty

Listed at intermediate level. It assumes you already own the underlying pattern and can hold position under load — if the position breaks before the target muscle tires, drop back to a beginner variation until it does not.

Of the 173 quadriceps exercises in this database, 62 are listed at intermediate level.

Related exercises

Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.