Starting Strength

through this position at the top.

    The shrug occurs as you jump with a slightly backwards-directed movement. Shrugging on a bar in front of you has to be a little backwards-directed so that the shrug does not pull your body forward. This keeps the system’s center of mass over the mid-foot during the last part of the pull. Because the hips have extended very hard and pushed the bar slightly away, and because the elbows must rotate under the bar for you to rack it on your shoulders, the bar path at this point may deviate forward a little from the vertical. The point immediately before this deviation is actually where peak power is produced. This deviation is a technique issue if it occurs before the jump, in which case it adversely affects power production.

    Figure 6-37. An exaggerated layback indicates an attempt to use the lifter’s bodymass to manipulate the horizontal position of a bar that is too far forward of the mid-foot. Refer to the diagram in Figure 4-24 .

    As the bar comes up high enough that your elbows must unlock, they begin to rotate up into the rack position. The clean is finished as the elbows complete their rotation by coming to a position pointing forward. During this rotation, the elbows NEVER rise above the level of the shoulders – in fact, they never even approach the level of the shoulders until the bar is racked. After you have stopped applying force to the bar, at the end of the jump, your elbows unlock and rise a short distance to the point where they are in flexion, and then they start forward into the rack. The elbows bend only after the force generated against the floor stops. Nothing slows a clean down more than an attempt to row the elbows up high and lift the bar with the arms.
    There is a bodybuilding exercise known as the upright row , in which the bar is raised to the chin with a narrow double-overhand grip. Most people have embedded deep in their brains a little bundle of brain material that tells them that all things must be lifted with the arms, especially if these things are going to be lifted above the waist. And embedded in your mind is a picture of a bodybuilder doing an upright row. It is a slow movement that uses the arms and deltoids, and though it bears a superficial resemblance to the clean, it has absolutely nothing to do with our explosive power clean. After the bar leaves the jumping position, no thought whatsoever should be given to the arms. None. The clean is a jump with the bar in the hands, after which the elbows are jammed forward to catch the bar on the shoulders. It should be as though there is no elbow activity at all during this phase; the bar rises up in response to the jump, and then the elbows jam forward and the shoulders jam into the bar.
    After the bar leaves the jumping position, it must stay close to the chest so that it doesn’t have to travel very far back to get into the rack position. If the bar heads away from the body between the jump and the rack, in the trajectory that is referred to as a “loop,” the distance between the bar and the shoulders has to be closed. You will have to do this either by pulling the bar back in to the shoulders (possible with light weights) or, more likely, by jumping forward to meet the bar. Neither of these motions is efficient; any amount of force that directs the bar anywhere other than straight up to the shoulders is wasted, because that force can be used more productively.
    You correct a loop by first determining why the bar is going forward. If the jump starts early, i.e., if you hit the jumping position too low on the thighs, the bar will loop forward due to a back angle that is not vertical enough. If the bar is to go straight up, your back must be vertical enough that most of the hip extension is already over before you jump; otherwise, the remaining hip extension will swing the bar away into a loop ( Figure 6-38 ).

    Figure 6-38. If the jump starts early, i.e., the bar is too low on the thighs, the bar swings away forward. This happens due to the back angle: the finish of the pull depends on the rigid back’s angular velocity, generated by hip extension, and if the back is not sufficiently vertical, the force of the jump will be directed along a non-vertical path.

You determine this fault by observing where on the thighs the bar is when the jump occurs. Immediately after the clean, pull your sweats down (discreetly) and look for the faint red line on the thighs where the bar touched; the line