It will come as no surprise to many of you that I have already purchased and read Dmitry Klokov’s book from Juggernaut (although it may surprise you that I waited a full three hours after it was published to do so).
While his autobiography is interesting, the best part is the series of training videos that come with the PDF. He doesn’t go into programming details or general training philosophy, but these basic “how to” videos are gold, at least to someone who is still learning like me.
One thing he emphasized was foot positioning. He likes feet fairly angled out, not straight forward. And if Klokov suggests it, you can be damn sure I’m gonna try it.
So I went from this:
with knees tracking forward like this:
to this:
with knees naturally tracking laterally like this:
Know what happened? Well first, it turns out it wasn’t as challenging as I thought. I figured that I had limited mobility and it would be difficult to pull this way but it’s brilliant. Because knees track laterally, they get out of the way without doing a stripper pull/butt first thing to get knees out of the way of the bar. They just float laterally and the bar comes up, easy peasy. It also helps bring shoulders forward over the bar a bit setting you up for a perfect second pull. Voilá! A love of angled feet was born.
Give it a try! If you were ever a gymnast or dancer in your previous life there are some elite level lifters who pull almost from a “first position” feet angle. Try it if you’ve got the flexibility.
