Not In My Box | The Fitness and Coaching Podcast · Caffeine and Kilos | Fitness and Coaching Culture w/ Danny Lehr

Do Olympic Lifts Belong in Group Classes?

·1 hr 7 min·4 clips

“Push” is called “a waste,” while “chest up” gets a qualified yes.

1. Not In My Box | The Fitness and Coaching Podcast centers this episode on whether Olympic lifts belong in group classes and team weight rooms. 2. Daniel Lear hosts Wes Kitts, a two-time Olympian and American record holder, and Ryan Metzger, a collegiate strength coach and 2022 NSCA Assistant College Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year, because both coach barbell work at a high level. 3. The episode asks whether snatches are useful training tools or just lifts coaches like to teach and cue. 4. Lear starts with specific cue tests, asking about “push,” “stay tight,” “chest up,” “sacrifice your back,” and “barely move your feet.” 5. Kitts says “push is a waste” and treats some cues as noise when athletes are already under a heavy bar. 6. Lear then narrows the conversation to non-weightlifters, including college athletes, CrossFit classes, and general gym people. 7. Kitts describes starting at Cal Strength in a high school football weight room with “no strength training culture.” 8. He says Dave Spitz pushed him to teach snatches earlier, even though the team was still building basic organization and squat-clean skill. 9. Kitts argues that a high hang power snatch plus overhead squat is relatively easy to teach and less complicated than many coaches assume. 10. He says the movement gives a lot of reward for minimal risk when coached from the hip or from a hang position. 11. Metzger says her early coaching years at Kentucky and VCU made her think every athlete had to Olympic lift. 12. She later changed at Clemson, where staff told her “we don’t do that here,” and she had to find other ways to create the same stimulus. 13. Metzger says she used more mobility work, strength work, and plyometric work, including “high CNS” and “low CNS” jumps. 14. She also says she used rotational landmine work for softball athletes so they could learn to move weight quickly without doing obvious Olympic lifts. 15. Kitts says he has not had an acute weightlifting injury with the athletes he coached, and Metzger says she has seen only one lift-related injury on a max-out day. 16. Both coaches say teaching athletes how to miss and dump a lift matters when the bar gets too heavy. 17. The tone stays conversational and practical, with the host using jokes, true-or-false prompts, and short stories to keep the discussion moving. 18. The format is a coaching roundtable that moves from cueing, to snatch teachability, to injury risk, to sport-specific decisions. 19. Coaches who train athletes, CrossFitters, or barbell-curious gym members will find the discussion useful. 20. Listeners wanting a strict technical snatch tutorial may skip it.

As heard by us

A blunt coaching debate about cues, load choices, and why copying sport motions in the gym can be misguided.

This episode stays on a plain but useful coaching argument: when loud cues like push or stay tight help a lifter, when a quieter reminder such as chest up does more, and how much the answer depends on the athlete in front of them.

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Why you'd press play

Should you yell "push," or is that just noise?

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