Starting Strength

will be visible for several seconds after the contact. Or you can chalk the bar to make this mark more visible on the sweats themselves ( Figure 6-39 ). If you have a jumping position that starts consistently too low on the thighs, think about waiting longer or touching higher before you jump.

    Figure 6-39. Chalk is a handy tool for many jobs in the weight room. In this case, it lets you identify and gauge the contact of the bar against the thighs at the jumping position.

    If the loop occurs because you are forward on your toes during the lower pull off the floor, your heels will be “soft” against the floor and your knees will be forward as the bar passes them. In this case, the bar loops because it is headed forward from the ground up, as the bar path will show on your video or to your coach ( Figure 6-40 ). Get back off of your toes and onto the mid-foot to start the pull, and make sure you keep your heels down until you jump with the bar well up on the thighs.
     

    Figure 6-40. A trajectory error originating below the knees. This error occurs when the start position is especially bad, with the heels “soft” – not planted firmly - against the floor, the knees forward, and the bar forward of the mid-foot.

    If you somehow manage to loop the bar from the correct jumping position, you may be “banging” it away from you, off of the thighs. This rather uncommon problem is caused by not jumping up, the movement that makes the bar climb straight up the body. This error would occur as the result of an incorrect understanding of the movement: the perception that the clean “swings” into position on the shoulders, propelled by a bounce off the thighs. Our teaching method for the power clean makes a mistake like this almost impossible, but bad habits imported from previous instruction are often in evidence. The emphasis on the jump and the correct use of the arms keeps the bar close to the body on the way through the top part of the pull. You can think about shrugging the bar at this point if you need to, or you can make the bar touch your shirt on the way up. Keep the bar close enough to you that you feel it on the way up as it passes your chest, and you will have shrugged it.
    Actually, if you try to touch your shirt on the way up, this will usually correct the errors made at the bottom. This is an excellent example of “correction displacement,” in which sufficient attention focused on correcting an error later in a sequence of movements unconsciously causes the correction of the initial problem earlier in the sequence. If you manage to touch your shirt with the bar before you rack it, you will have to get back on your heels to do it, since the shirt is more back toward the heels than forward toward the toes. This correction displacement trick comes in handy many times in the weight room and throughout athletics.
     

    Figure 6-41. Touching the shirt on the way up keeps the bar closer to the ideal vertical bar path. Thinking about getting it there can unconsciously correct the pulling errors that led to the problem: the bar cannot swing away forward when you are pulling toward the shirt, and the hips and knees cannot get in a position to swing the bar away if you are doing what it takes to keep it close from the start of the pull. This is NOT the same thing as using the arms to raise the bar up to the shirt – an upright row, the most useless exercise in the world.

    A “finished pull” is characterized by a position common to both the clean and the snatch. The hips and knees are in full extension; the feet are in “plantar flexion” (up on the toes); the traps have pulled the shoulders up into a shrug; the head is in the normal position relative to the neck, with the chin perhaps slightly up but the neck not in overextension; the elbows are not yet unlocked; and there is a slight backward lean (see Figure 6-36 , above). This position will be attained if all the power of the hip and knee extension has been milked out of the pull. It is common to fail to fully extend the hips and knees, leaving untapped the most mechanically powerful position at the end of the range of motion. The cue to “Finish the pull!” echoes through training halls all over the world as coaches encourage their athletes to get all possible power out of the jump.
    Despite the fact that the fully extended top position has the lifter up on his toes, active ankle extension is not really a huge contributor to the explosion. The