The weightlifting paradox.

I seem to get a lot of my inspiration from one liners. Ironically most of those one liners come from crappy movies. Case in point is the new Hercules movie with a line from the fortune teller dude. "The gods are generous on hints and cheap on specifics." I think that is a pretty profound insight to quite a few things in life. There are so many hints as to what we should do in life. Wether it is a small spark of divine inspiration, or when you just know what you need to do there are always hints but rarely specifics. Weightlifting is the opposite it's all specifics and no hints. Time for an example, on the snatch you have a nasty habit of slamming your hips into the bar so forcefully and in such a way that it leaves you with an attractive bruise the size of a grapefruit square on the center of your pubic bone. Your coach is watching you and notices that your shoulders are getting behind the bar far too quickly, turning your hips into a bullet train slamming into a wall instead of a smooth easy slingshot. What does your coach say? Here I'll fill in the blank, "Keep your shoulders over the bar_____(insert insult, or encouraging follow up depending on your coach____)."Weightlifting being the precision sport that it is doesn't allow for much more than succinct straight forward directions.
The problem is that we humanoids are feelers. We are used to having to use the hints to get to the specifics instead of the other way around. Therefore the way that we get around the roadblocks that so inevitably come in weightlifting is to teach/learn by feeling. For example I had a lifter who was having a hard time getting consistent hip contact on the snatch. Sometimes is was there and sometimes it was like there was supposed to be some sort of teleportation device that sent the bar from thigh level to over head. So I gave her the usual cues that I often give my lifters with this problem but to no avail. What we did instead was I stood a couple of feet in front of her with a band wrapped around an empty bar. She then got down into her snatch position and pulled. What happened was as the bar rose the band tightened as it approached her hips. This caused her to have to engage the lats and set the shoulders correctly. Thus causing her to sweep the bar into the hips out of necessity.
Guess what the next rep with weight on the bar....Boom, money... nearly perfect hip contact. Why? She felt the way that it was supposed to feel. If you're wondering, no her hip contact isn't always perfect. But now since she knows how it feels so she can have a bearing to work from when cues are given. Although helpful as an example this is from a coaching perspective and as it is most of the people who read this are not coaches. So lets approach a similar problem from the lifters point of view.
Let's say that I am working on my cleans and I've been lifting for about a year. I can move a decent amount of weight in my opinion and I'm just chomping at the bit to go heavier and heavier whenever my coach isn't looking, problem is my receiving position is terrible as weights get high. I catch the bar low on my shoulders, causing my back to round, and if I don't drop it my weight shifts 100% to my toes. One day coach sees me trying to PR when I'm supposed to be working at 80%...CRAP. After getting chewed out he says, "You aren't following all the way through with your pull. You don't stand all the way up so the bar doesn't reach it's maximum speed." He shows you the covertly taken video he took of the last rep and sure enough the hips are still partially closed, and you try to ignore the stifled laughter on the video." He tells you to drop back to 70% and fix it and goes back to helping a teammate.
How can fix what you didn't know you were doing in the first place? The answer is almost always to feel it out. Why are you at 70% now instead of 80%? So that you don't have to think about any of the other things that are going on. At 70% everything can basically be on auto pilot and you can focus on the feeling of perfect hip extension and the added power that you receive from it. You can feel how long it takes for you to stand up fully. You can feel the bar location and speed. Because you felt you can now know.
I believe it takes a special kind of person (or robot) to be able to just do exactly what they are told without a corresponding physical experience. Truth is I'm not one and none of the people that coach are because most of us just aren't wired that way. So next time you plateau or you have something that you just can't seem to dial in. Step back and FEEL it out.