Movement Mastery – How to Power Clean

Image: CrossFit Atlanta

I’ll give you $20 bucks if you can name an exercise that is as widely misunderstood and commonly executed as poorly as the power clean.  It’s a staple of high school football weight training routines, yet for some reason, many coaches never bother to teach their kids correct form.  It’s just like the quarter squats these seemingly well-meaning ‘mentors’ espouse: poor form to boost the numbers.  If you’ve been reading our other articles, you notice that we preach the gospel of good form because it both puts you in the strongest position and helps you avoid injury.  We’re going to dramatically simplify the power clean here today so that you can learn how to do it, possibly in one session:
1.    Review your deadlifting form.  Until you can deadlift perfectly, you need to focus on that.  Power cleans start with a deadlift, so it’s critical that you understand how to do those before attempting cleans.
2.    Start the progression by performing Power Shrugs.  This is a deadlift where you shrug hard at the top while jumping.  Start with about 50% of your deadlift 1RM and try sets of 3.  You want to pull the weight smoothly from the floor and explode as you pull it up.  NEVER FLEX YOUR ARMS.  It’s ok if they fly up a little, especially with lighter weights, but you must never flex your biceps to pull the weight up.  When the bar is halfway up the thighs, jump and perform a powerful shrug.  If the weight is too light, you might actually leave the ground, so keep adding a little more until it’s challenging.
3.    Once you get up to a weight where the power shrug is difficult, start in the other direction by dropping the bar down from the rack position.  At first, simply walk up to the bar at chest-height with your arms stretched out in front of you like a mummy, zombie, or whatever monsters don’t have good elbow mobility these days.  Get under the bar and see what it feels like to have it rest on the front of your shoulders.  Once you remember how that feels, step back, put your hands on the bar at the same width as your deadlift, and then bend the elbows under so you can step to the position we were in before where the bar is on your shoulders.  If you do that whilst keeping your hands on the bar, you’ll notice that you probably have to let go of your grip and let the bar roll back onto you fingers.  This is fine, and probably preferred.  Once you can hold the bar on your shoulders with your fingers on it and keep your elbows parallel to the ground, take it out of the rack and practice dropping it down from that position.  If you want, you can simply curl the bar back up to the hooks, get in the rack position again and drop it.
4.    Now that you know the rack position, we’re going to try a hang clean.  Deadlift the bar up to just above your knees, then stop.  Your butt will be back, knees bent, and you must keep your shoulders over the bar.  From there, jump up and shrug powerfully.  If you do this correctly, the bar will fly up, and your elbows will almost automatically whip underneath the bar.  As mentioned above, NEVER EVER FLEX YOUR BICEPS WHILST CLEANING!  Doing so is one of the easiest ways to spend some time in the hospital, some more time in physical therapy, and even more time paying off your surgery bills.  Think of your arms as ropes.  They simply connect your powerfully shrugging shoulders to the bar below.  When you shrug, the ropes will have some slack in them, but the end will find its way to your shoulders.
5.    Now that you can do a hang clean, put it all together and perform a full power clean.  Do a power shrug, but this time, explode and whip your elbows beneath the bar so you catch it on your shoulders.

And that’s the power clean.  There are plenty of schools of thought on teaching it: top down, top up, hybrid, hell, some Olympic coaches require that their lifters practice various other exercises for months before trying the clean.  In my experience, this is the easiest way to get it done.  I had been trying to learn it for a while, but it never made sense to me.  Then one day, a strength coach from my alma mater Virginia Tech was training a young wrestling recruit at the off-campus gym where I trained.  He showed me the method I described to you above and I learned how to clean with good form in about 25 minutes.