Karlos Nasar’s Technique Has Changed – Here’s Exactly How

Karlos Nasar just turned 22. He’s not the teenager everyone was talking about a few years ago anymore. He’s a mature athlete making conscious decisions about how he wants to lift.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting a lot of questions on Instagram and YouTube about his technique changes. So I decided to break it down properly, focusing especially on the clean & jerk, where the changes are most visible.

What Changed in the Clean & Jerk

If you put side by side his 225kg from 2024, 229kg from 2025, and 223kg from the 2026 Europeans in Batumi, you can clearly see something has shifted.

The knees: In 2024 he had a pretty significant knee cave, knees collapsing inward when driving out of the hole. In 2026, he’s actively trying to control them, keeping them in the sides. It’s a deliberate change, and it shows.

The front rack: The oscillation is still there, that’s his style, and it works at these weights. What changed is that he’s now exaggerating the head position. He stays with his head back for longer and then drives it forward aggressively. A few Soviet athletes, including Yuri Vardanian, had something similar, but generally, it’s not an ideal position because it relaxes the core and puts extra stress on the lower back.

The start position: I really like his new start position from 2026, it’s the best he’s had. His arms are better too, even though he’s still using them a bit early.

Why Did He Miss at 223?

A lot of people blamed the miss on the head position. I don’t think that’s it. If you watch carefully, the miss happens in the dip; his center of gravity was slightly forward, and at 223kg, any small imbalance costs you the lift.

At these weights, 97.5% of your max, you need an exceptional day. You can hit a perfect clean, a perfect jerk all the way to 95% and still miss at 96-97%. That’s weightlifting, it’s not always about technique, sometimes it’s simply about that specific day. If you want to know exactly where your percentages stand, use my Clean & Jerk Strength Calculator

Why I Like What Karlos Nasar Is Doing

Some people might say the changes are a step back. He already hit 229. Why change anything?

I see it differently. At 22 years old, with a new coach and a new team, Karlos is exploring. He’s showing his brain different ways of lifting. And that’s exactly how you find your real technique, not by copying one pattern and staying there forever.

I did the same thing when I was his age. I kept changing things, tried different variations, and sometimes got worse before getting better. And eventually I found what works for me.

Karlos is a smart athlete. He’ll figure out what helps him and what doesn’t. And if the 223 miss makes him reconsider some things, good, that’s the process.

An Important Technical Point About the Knees

I want to explain something about knee cave because it’s a topic a lot of athletes and coaches get wrong.

When you drive out of the hole, your body needs to create compression to generate force. Knees that cave slightly inward are often a consequence of that compression, not a mistake in itself.

When you drive out of the hole, your body needs to create compression to generate enough force to stand up. This is not optional. No matter who you are, no matter how strong you are, if the weight is heavy enough and your body can’t create that compression, you will not stand up. Period.

Now, every athlete does it differently. Some do it through a knee cave. Some, through a hip shift, like Naim Süleymanoğlu. Some by arching the lower back, you see this a lot with the Italian girls. And some, when they try to block everything at the knees, hips and lower back, end up rounding the upper back instead. That’s where you get that cobra clean style, and those athletes are always told they have a weak core, when in reality the problem is they’re not allowing their lower body to do that compression.

The body always finds a way. The question is just where.

If you artificially force your knees out, external rotation, you destroy the compression and lose force. You’ll feel more comfortable and more stable, but you’ll lift less. It’s a trap a lot of athletes fall into without realising it.

Want me to analyse another athlete’s technique? Let me know in the comments below.

And if you want to work on your own technique, check out my programs on Super Weightlifting.