The jerk can has great benefit to the power athlete.  It requires speed, coordination and decent shoulder range of motion to perform correctly.  Here we have an athlete who doesn’t have much training in the jerk.    The drive is initiated with the legs then you push yourself under the bar.  You are using your speed to get under the bar as well as strength to initiate the drive.  This lift allows you to stabilize a lot of weight overhead and you can’t perform it correctly if you don’t move fast.  The goal is to get as much out of your legs as possible and move YOURSELF under the bar rather than trying to simply push the bar overhead.  Since the weight used can be very heavy there is no eccentric phase and the bar is typically dropped.

As the trained eye can see the form isn’t Olympic weightlifter perfect but we don’t need that for this example.  Instead you can realize that this is 3x Olympian Lauryn Williams just messing around with overhead stuff between winning medals and being faster than you.  As a side note she is also pound for pound the strongest female ever to lift at the gym.   Follow her bobsled adventures here: @LaurynCwilliams