Starting Strength

hooks when you’re racking it. (If your arms are short, you need to use a bench with adjustable uprights.) But if you try to set the bar down on the horizontal surface first, then you are not all the way back to the uprights as you try to set the bar down, and you will eventually miss the rack, usually one of the hooks on one side. This same advice applies to the squat for exactly the same reasons.
    Certain circumstances might require the use of two spotters, as during the heavy attempts at a power meet, but normal weight-room conditions very seldom require more than one competent spotter. The problem with two spotters is the unalterable fact that two people cannot assist one lifter in a perfectly balanced way, especially when they must react quickly. The uneven loading that the lifter will inevitably experience is a potential source of injury. It is physically impossible for two people, even careful, experienced people, to pull upward with exactly the same amount of force on each side of a bar. They will therefore subject the lifter to uneven loading at exactly the time when that stress is most likely to cause an injury – during a rep that is too heavy to lift. This is true of both the squat and the bench press. The problem in the bench press is solved with the use of the single spotter, a perfectly reasonable way to spot for the vast majority of bench press workouts in which the weight on the bar has been correctly selected.

Chapter 6: The Power Clean
     
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    The power clean cannot be done slowly. There is therefore no confusion over the nature of the exercise. In essence, it is a jump with the bar in the hands, after which the bar is caught on the shoulders. The power clean is used in sports conditioning because it trains explosion, and done correctly it is the best exercise for converting the strength obtained in the other exercises to power. Other, easier-to-learn exercises like the vertical jump require explosion, and plyometrics have recently come into fashion in strength and conditioning for this reason. But the clean and the snatch are unique in their ability to be incrementally loaded with an increasingly heavier weight, making it possible to develop a more powerful explosion in a simple programmed way. Since the nature of the vast majority of sports is explosive, involving the athlete’s ability to accelerate his body or an object, the ability to accelerate is pivotal in sports performance. The power clean is our most important tool in this war against inertia.
    In his famous book The Strongest Shall Survive , Bill Starr included the power clean in his “Big Three,” with the comment that “If your program only allowed you to do one exercise, this would be the best.” The power clean has always been used by weightlifters as an assistance exercise for the clean, the more complicated version of the lift. The term “clean” refers to a way to get the bar clear of the floor and up to the shoulders, without soiling the bar by touching the body on the way up, as required by the rules in place several decades ago. If this is accomplished in one movement, it is a clean; if it is done in two movements (if the bar stops on a belt or the chest on the way up), it is referred to as a “Continental,” due apparently to the absence of a rule against it in mainland European contests at the time. In modern usage, the term “clean” refers to a full squat clean. It has not always been this way. The split clean – a style that used a forward/back split like that commonly used for the jerk in Olympic weightlifting – was the standard version until the 1960s, when the squat style began to be favored due to the heavier weights that could be lifted with this front-squat-based technique.

    Figure 6-1. The power clean is a variation of the squat clean – usually referred to as the “clean” – used in Olympic weightlifting. Bill Starr cleans 435 at the 1969 Nationals.

    The term “power” as a qualifier in front of an exercise refers to an abbreviated version of a more complicated movement, the shorter version being harder to perform because the extra technique stuff is there to make it easier to lift more weight. A power snatch is a snatch without a squat or split, the use of which reduces the distance the bar must be pulled. The power jerk is a version of the last part of the clean and jerk, but in the power jerk, the feet do not split. Likewise, the power clean is the version of the clean without a