Strength Report: Teaching the Clean: From A to Z (Part I)

We are constantly teaching our athletes how to move better and more efficiently. Our whole program is based on the concept of clean movement patterns, which is stability and mobility through the hips, trunk, and thoracic spine. From there, the ability to control your own body in space, then finally strengthening movement patterns that will benefit movements and learning how to generate, apply, and receive force in any way needed to perform better are our goals.

Most of us that played high school and/or college athletics have probably at one time lifted a barbell from the ground to your chest, the exercise better known as a clean. The objective was to put as much weight on the bar as possible and get it up by all means necessary. In other words, the focus was on how much, not how to?

I was one of those guys who tried to bounce the bumpers off the ground from a hang position to give me what I thought was to be more momentum on my first pull. I was also the guy who caught the bar with my feet as wide as possible because I did not know how to pull under the bar and my hip mobility probably would not have allowed me to do so anyway. 

When I became a performance coach, I began to ponder the question of the best way to teach the clean in a manner that was easy to implement and, more importantly, easy to understand for any athlete regardless of the level. I started going to courses and reading everything I could on Olympic weightlifting and implementation of the lifts. In my quest to find the best way to implement and teach the clean, I was influenced by coaches, authors, and athletes. If you are familiar with the names Pendlay, Everett, Takano, and Newton, you may recognize some of their teachings or methods in this article.

Teaching the clean takes an incredible amount of discipline from the coaching staff. One of the hardest things to do is to know the proper time to progress your athletes. With the clean, we like to follow a certain progression, but before we get to even thinking about the clean, our athletes have to be able to perform a basic set of movements with high efficiency. These movements include a great squat pattern, a proper hip hinge that loads the glutes and hamstrings, and the ability to violently extend the hips.

We use several exercises and drills to teach these fundamental concepts. First, is the kettlebell goblet squat. The athlete holds a kettlebell in front of his chest and squats to a depth where the hips are below their knees. This exercise serves to increase the athlete’s hip and ankle mobility by allowing him to sit back into the squat and use the kettlebell as a counterbalance (Photo 1).

Next is the hands free front squat (Photo 2).

This exercise is taught so the athlete knows exactly where the bar should be caught when doing a clean. The crease between the upper trap and the anterior deltoid is where the bar should rest during the catch of a clean. 

After the hands free front squat, we progress into the front squat (Photo 3).

During this phase, we get an opportunity to see which athletes have the ability to keep their elbows up and which ones do not possess the range of motion to properly front squat and ultimately properly receive the bar during a clean. We have several mobility exercises we utilize to help athletes increase their ROM to properly receive the bar.  Pictured below is the partner-assisted rack position stretch, the single arm lat stretch on a rack, and the kneeling prayer stretch (Photos 4-6).

In addition to the squat, we also teach the hip hinge motion, as we believe it is a crucial part of the clean. When performing a hip hinge, the athlete must be able to hinge at the waist without bending over or squatting. This happens when the athlete can hinge at the waist with a slight knee bend, shift their weight from the ball of the foot to the heels and keep the torso in a stiff posture (Photo 7).
 

When the athlete is able to correctly do this with bodyweight, we can add load in the form of a kettlebell or barbell and perform a Romanian deadlift – RDL (Photo 8).
   

Coming in PART II:  Proper hip extension, where power is generated, is detailed in Part II.

About the Author: Zac Woodfin joined the UAB staff as Director of Sports Performance in January, 2014. He previously was the assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Green Bay Packers. A former linebacker for the Blazers, Woodfin played parts of three years in the NFL. He was also a performance specialist for Athletes’ Performance in Los Angeles, working with many NFL and Olympic athletes.

Contributing coaches, interns, and GA’s: Jack Wilson • Stewart Young • SaJason Finley • Rhonda Watts • Blake Klotz • Stacey Torman • Cory Schlesinger • Jhun Cook • Corey Harris • Zac Woodfin