Tag: long arms

Impossible careers

A month ago, I had this idea that rather than squatting and deadlifting super heavy, I should learn “olympic lifts” (snatch, clean and jerk). I’d even made up my mind that I’ll ask one of the coaches at my gym to offer personal training during the summer so I can learn it.

And then, randomly, 2-3 weeks back, I decided to do some new exercises, and decided to do snatch grip overhead squat (something you need to do while you’re doing an olympic snatch). And that’s when I realised I would struggle.

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times that I have incredibly long arms. What I had not realised is that I have long enough, and a torso short enough, that it is physically impossible for me to snatch with a barbell.

Really.

So in the snatch, you need to use a wide grip and bring up the barbell, and at the same time thrust your hips forward to make sure the hips hit the barbell. The momentum of you having sharply pulled the barbell off the floor, and the hips hitting it, means that the barbell will go upwards, and you squat down and catch it overhead.

The key is that your waist needs to precisely hit the barbell when you thrust your hips forward. If the bar makes contact higher, your stomach can’t convey the same momentum that the waist can. And if the bar makes contact lower, well, let’s not get into below-the-belt stuff here.

And so your snatch grip on the barbell is determined by the width you hold it at so that the bar is exactly at your waist. You see professional weightlifters, and they usually hold the barbell well inside the ends (apparently short arms are a huge advantage in professional weight lifting). Most people in my gym also hold their snatch grip well inside the ends of the bar. Just that I can’t.

I got this photo taken at the gym today to demonstrate this:

Me trying to hold a snatch grip.

I tucked in my shirt to show where my waist is. Notice that I’m holding the bar in the widest possible position. Yet I’m unable to get the bar to my waist. So with my body proportions, if I were to try and snatch, I would be putting myself in grave danger.

The reason I’ve told such a long story here is to illustrate that your choice of profession or game or sport highly depends on who you are. If, for whatever reason, I’d decided when I was young that weightlifting is cool and I want to specialise in that, I would have NEVER made it.

A lot of times, we make the mistake of going for “cool stuff” (or worse, forcing our kids to do something that we think is cool), without realising if we are cut out to do the cool stuff -whether we will like it, enjoy it and be good at it. And sometimes, driven by “inspirational stories”, we push ourselves too hard to get the cool job or college admission or whatever, without realising we may not have the aptitude for it at all.

Now that I tried to find my snatch grip, I know better than to take personal training for snatching. Yes, I should still be able to clean – though every time I’ve tried to learn, I’ve found it to involve too much coordination between my limbs (just like swimming, something else I’ve never managed to learn though my long arms should make me good at it).

I guess I should just stick to my strengths, and just deadlift and chill.

The Law is an Ape

I’ve always known that I have long arms relative to the size of the rest of my body. I think I discovered this sometime in the late 90s, around the time I both stopped growing vertically and started wearing full arm shirts. I remember being forced to buy shirts one size too large for my shoulders because otherwise the sleeves wouldn’t reach all the way down.

My father had the same problem as well, and so he wore shirts one size too large as well. Over time, I managed to find brands that fit both my shoulders and my arms properly (the Aditya Birla stable is good for this -Loius Phillippe, Van Heusen, etc. Arrow never fits me). And then I took to getting my formal shirts tailored. Last year I bought a bunch at Gap, after I found that they fit me well.

Only recently, while I was trying to analyse my performances at the gym, that I realised that my long arms might be affecting stuff apart from my attire as well. For the longest time now, I’ve been trying to learn to power clean, and have never quite managed it.

The power clean involves, among other things, holding the bar with your arms outstretched where it touches the fold in your waist (where your torso meets your groin). The idea is that as you pull the bar up past your thighs, you make it touch the fold in your waist while performing a “triple extension” and jumping, and that will power the bar up.

And I recently discovered that I can’t make my bar touch the fold of my waist unless I hold it really really wide, like you do for a snatch. “Maybe I have long arms”, I thought, and then remembered my troubles with buying shirts.

And then I started wondering if I could quantify if I actually had long arms. Looked around a little and found that there is the concept of the “wing span” or “arm span“. I figured how to measure it, and got my wife to measure it for me. It’s 192 cm. My height is between 179 and 180 cm. This means my arm span is 12-13 cm, or nearly 5 inches longer than my height.

Most humans have their arm spans about the same as their height, or just a little longer. According to this article, my long arms mean that I could have been an elite basketball player or a swimmer, since these sports are good for people with long arms. That perhaps explains why I was a decent defender in basketball in school, though I was among the least athletic people you could find.

I kept looking, and reading articles. I thought of myself as being “the Law” (long arms, get it?). And then I came across this measure where rather than subtracting your height from your arm span, you take the ratio. The ratio of your arm span to your height is called “ape index“.

Most humans have an ape index close to 1. NBA players have an average ape index of 1.06. My ape index is higher than 1.07. Shortly after she had measured my arm span, I told my wife about this. “Well, I always knew you were an ape”, she said.

So yes, for my height I have really long arms. This means I find it hard to buy shirts that fit me. This also means I find it relatively easier to deadlift. Long arms also mean that I find movements where I have to lock out my hands upwards, like the bench press or the overhead press, really difficult. Maybe this explains why I have piddly bench and overhead numbers compared to my squat or deadlift? Long arms also make it harder to do pull ups, which possibly explains why completed my first ever pull up in life at 37.

You could think I am the law. You could also think I am an ape. Or maybe, the law is an ape?