Clearing Up the Clean: Why You Should or Should Not Do Power Cleans

Being in and around weight rooms and serving as a consultant to countless athletic teams, there are some themes that I find are unfortunately recurring and common:

1. The football team is usually the only team that has an organized (somewhat) lifting program

2. That program is usually Bench Press, Squat and Power Clean with a bunch of other random exercises piled on

3. This approach is prevalent from the high school to college to pro ranks

4. All other sports follow a carbon copy of the football team, even though most times it doesn’t have application or carryover in any way, shape or form. Seriously, I have had Division I Girls Lacrosse and Field Hockey players who were handed the actual football program and they just scratched out “Football” and wrote in “Field Hockey” or “Lacrosse”. Are you kidding me? Someone is getting paid for this???

Today I want to take on just one element of this dilemma and discuss the Power Clean. It is often implemented to improve athletic power (I’ve been told it is a “football” exercise. Huh?).

The problem is that the Clean is a very highly technical skill. If you get real good at it you can win a gold medal. This technical skill is rarely taught correctly in a room full of over thirty 14-17 year old boys with little to no weight room experience. The amount of times I have walked into a weight room and seen anyone doing anything close to good form I can count on one hand.

Other than just the lack of coaching and experience, there are several other issues that detract from deriving any benefit from doing Power Cleans in your program:

1. If you can’t rack the bar correctly, YOU CAN’T CLEAN

I can always tell the athlete who can’t rack a bar correctly on their shoulders when they come in with their wrist taped or bandaged up after a bout of Cleans. They lack the flexibility to get under the bar so they beat the hell out of their wrists, or even worse, their spines. I have been told about a local high school football team that had over a dozen kids with reported stress fractures in their lumbar spines. This is not coincidence. This is what happens when a Power Clean turns into an ugly jump and curl and you catch the bar by leaning back and slamming into your low back every time.

2. If you can’t Front Squat, YOU CAN’T CLEAN

For many of the same reasons as listed above about being able to get under the bar well and rack it, the Front Squat forces you to be able to keep your chest tall and spine long or you will dump the bar forward. If you can’t do this while sitting back into your hips, you will never be able to catch the bar to complete the clean.

3. If you can’t High Pull, YOU CAN’T CLEAN

If you have even the simplest understanding of leverage, you know that the further an object you are lifting is away from your body, the heavier it becomes. If you are going to efficiently produce power into the bar, you need to be able to create a pathway up the front of your body once it leaves your thighs.

4. If you can’t Deadlift, YOU CAN’T CLEAN

There is an old expression that “you can’t start with chicken sh** and end up with chicken salad.” The Deadlift is the foundation and starting point for all Olympic lifts. If you can’t work solidly off of this base, everything after that is going downhill.

What about starting from stands or from a “Hang” position? Same deal, from a movement perspective it is still just hip hinging, but you’re just limiting your range of motion.

So are you saying Cleans are Bad???

No I’m saying most people are really bad at Cleans. So because of that most people shouldn’t do them.

But what if I really want to do them???

OK. Fair enough. Follow the 4 elements I listed above separately and build the “pieces” or “chunks” of the Clean each individually. Get really good at Deadlifts, Front Squats, High Pulls and racking the bar first. Once you can master these, then get good coaching on the technical elements of the Clean and you will get much better returns, while severely minimizing the risk of injury.

Do I really NEED to do them?

In my humble opinion, NO. You can get all of the power benefits from doing Front Squats and Deadlifts and compliment that with Kettlebell Swings, Jumps and less risky unilateral dumbbell Olympic lifts.

Don’t believe me? Join the club.

When I tell most football coaches to drop the Clean out their program they look at me like I just asked them to stop wearing helmets on the field. I just always knew instinctively that for all of the reasons listed above that they were doing more harm than good with Cleans. Then I got proof.

I recently implemented a 4-Day Off-Season Program with a local high school team. When I went through the program with the coach, he was extremely hesitant and nervous that I had no Cleans anywhere in the program. After talking him off of the ledge, I got him to trust me and said give it 2 months and let’s see what happens. He tested all of the players in their Bench, Squat and Clean before implementing the program. He then re-tested them 8 weeks later. Here is what happened:

Bench Press – Average Increase – 12.38lbs / 8.5%

Squat – Average Increase – 26.07lbs / 12.3%

Clean – Average Increase – 14.61lbs / 11.4% – Without ever doing a single Clean!!!

I heard a coach once say that he could predict his season based on how many kids on his team could Power Clean 255 pounds. For every one that could do 225, it equalled one win. I can’t dispute or confirm this statistically, but I do know one thing:

You can get much better at Cleans, by NOT doing Cleans. The net result can be the same, and you can save valuable time, while minimizing injury risk significantly, by going this alternate route.

I’m sure some might argue the merits

of this spine wrecker, but it definitely

would smells like greasy fast food to me

fat in their diet, while others don’t.

The same can be said for exercise. Before you can answer if any exercise or program is “good” for you, you need to know a number of different variables, including, but not limited to the following:

–YOUR GOAL

-Fitness level

-Training Age

-Recoverability

-Movement Competency

-Work Tolerance

-Work Capacity

-Lifestyle

-Daily Activities outside of training

-Season (Off/Pre/In/Post-Season for athletes)

-Training Time

One of my mentors, Gray Cook, talks often about Program Minimums. This means if I had write a program for you and I only had a very minimum amount of time, equipment and exercises to work with, what what would be the most vital elements that you NEED. Paul Chek refers in programming to “Big Bang” exercises, meaning that you are addressing a number of needs with one movement rather than isolating out a number of individual pieces of them. The Turkish Get Up for example, addresses multiple movements patterns in fell swoop, eliminating the need for a laundry list of more isolated exercises when time is limited.

The Program Minimum is what you NEED to do. Everything beyond that is what would be nice to do. For example, if you only have 2 days per week to train, there probably isn’t going to time for you to do wrist curls and calf exercises, simply because there are too many other more primary needs to be met and those things only cover a small isolated segment and you will be missing out on achieving the larger overall goal.

Now if you have 5-6 days to train per week, and you want to crank out bicep curls, you can by all means go after it once you have achieved your program minimums and it does not take away from your function or performance, or more importantly, cause pain.

What this looks like in real life is that on a 4-5 day program, Days 1 and 2 and/or 3 are comprised of “Big Bang” exercises. For a person on a 2-Day program, that is where is stops. For the trainee with more training time, the extra days towards the end of the training week can be used to satisfy their psychological as well as physiological needs. So for my endurance athletes, that is when you can add some extra conditioning work and for those looking for aesthetics / muscular development we can add in a “Tight T-Shirt” Friday workout to get a pump and feed our egos for the weekend:)

On the flip side, please also note that there is also a Program Maximum. This means that there comes a critical mass or tipping point where additional training will not only produce no result, it may have a negative affect and hurt and not help progress. Tim Ferriss discusses this extensively in his book the 4-Hour Body, focusing on the efficiency of your programming and that more is definitely not always better. A great example of this is programming for American football players in their off-season training. Research has shown that after 6-8 weeks of conditioning, there is minimal increase in aerobic capacity. In other words, if you want to build maximum work capacity or endurance for sport, count back 6-8 weeks from the competition and begin your conditioning there. Any additional time spent training this system will produce negligible, if not negative returns. So for the football players, the time you do not spend conditioning can be much better spent working on your strength, size, speed, power and athleticism. In football, you don’t win any trophies for being in great shape in April. On top of that, excessive endurance work will curb your ability to maximally create the strength, size, speed, power and athleticism that is absolutely necessary and critical for success in football.

Remember the story of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears??? The porridge couldn’t be too cold or too hot, it had to be just right. Not everybody likes their food at the same temperature. Sure if it is too cold it is intolerable and too hot you’ll burn your mouth. Everything else in between is along a continuum. Sound familiar? So next time you want to know if something in your exercise program is good or bad, think “how do you like your porridge and what is right for you???”