- Starting position: Your starting position is ACTIVE. The bar should be touching you, and your lats should be tight, pulling down your back, creating tension. Your butt should be down, with your shoulders still over the bar. The whole foot should be flat. The weight should not be in your toes. The knuckles should be down. Get comfortable holding this position before you start the lift. Find your start and lock it in.
- To lift the bar off the floor, you must drive DOWN through the feet, as if you are pushing the floor into to the center of the earth. The weight will shift more towards the heels so that you can keep your butt STILL. Essentially, as you lift the bar off the floor, your position should stay the same as your starting position, in terms of hip and shoulder angles. This is why it is important to find, hold, and lock your start.
- The biggest error in this section is the butt rising before the chest. This is due to a lack of hamstring development or just not being conscious of using them. You must correct this. Failure to do so pulls the weight to the toes too soon, causing the lift to move forward. You’ll also end up having an extremely hard time getting to a proper power position, and you will also end up using more lower back than legs, increasing your chances for injury.
- The second biggest error is pulling the shoulders behind the bar too soon. The shoulders should remain at the same angle over the bar until the bar is just past the knee. Otherwise, you’ll end up jumping back in the clean. You’ll also over-develop your quads, and under-develop your posterior chain.
- THE ARMS. The arms in this stage don’t do anything. The lats are tight, making sure the bar path stays STRAIGHT. However, the arms are simply ropes at this point, waiting for their turn. It is important that the arms remain this way for the duration of the first pull. Would you do a deadlift with bent arms? Then don’t bend your arms in your clean.
- Speed: Some people will pull faster than others from the floor. For the majority of you, you do not need to go quickly off the floor. This whole section is about stability. You must increase your speed after the knee, so if you start too fast, you may not be able to increase your speed when needed.
This whole section lasts less than a second during a lift- and there’s so much to think about! That’s why there’s so much tendency to lose a lift during this section. This is where a lot of lifts go wrong- the very first second. Most of you do a lot of these things right. It’s probably just one or two things you need to think about and go over in your head. You can practice them in your warmups, when we do deadlifts, and especially when we do deadlifts or lifts with pauses, like we did yesterday. And of course, if something doesn’t make sense, ask your coaches!