Starting Strength

It feels better when the feet stomp and the bar racks at exactly the same time, and your body will time the rack to coincide with the stomp. And if the stomp is fast, it pulls the rack along faster with it. The simultaneity of the two events is fairly automatic, and not too many people will stomp out of phase with the rack because it just feels too weird. So the stomp actually sharpens the timing of the racking movement. A certain amount of knee bend, necessary to cushion the catching of the weight, will accompany the stomp. Catching the weight with perfectly straight knees is not desirable and actually doesn’t occur very often since it also feels too weird. The stomp thus makes the movement faster, while cushioning the catch.
    The feet will stomp into a position that’s approximately the same as the squat stance, as mentioned earlier. In practice, this should mean a couple of inches per side wider. Some people will shift their feet out to a position wider, and perhaps much wider, than a squat stance. This is an attempt to drop lower under the bar, in lieu of pulling it high enough. You don’t get a good stomp going this wide because the angle is not conducive to stomping and the distance covered is so great that it takes too long. Stomping is quick; lateral splitting is not. Correct this error by stomping into your correct starting position footprints several times without the bar, and then focus on this foot position during the clean with a lighter weight that you can rack properly. Stubborn cases may have to actually attempt to stomp into the pulling-stance footprints, or even narrower, in order to get enough correction to eliminate the lateral split. A lateral split is a bad thing to choose as a habit: it is dangerous, hard to control, and ineffective. The purpose of the power clean is to pull the bar as fast and as high as possible. We don’t want to make it easier to get under the bar; we want to pull the bar higher. And if we were going to make it easier to get under the bar, we would use the standard squat or the split version of the clean, not some weird bastardized mutation thereof.

    Figure 6-46. A lateral split is very common among novices and high school athletes who have never been corrected. It is often associated with other racking technique problems, such as bad elbow position and leaning back. It is corrected by giving the feet a job to do: stomp your feet back into your footprints or just a little wider.

    Another stomping error involves pulling the heels up very high in the back and slamming them back into the platform, as if to merely make noise. From the side it looks like a knee flexion, certainly not an efficient part of a well-finished pull. This is called a “donkey kick,” and it takes so much time to perform at exactly the wrong time that it can ruin the last 10-20% of the pull. Anything that takes away from pulling the bar as high as possible diminishes the ability to clean heavy weights. The donkey kick is a misinterpretation of what the feet do at the end of the pull; it will not be a problem for you if you learned the clean using our method. It is corrected by a conscious focus on finishing high on the toes.
    After you rack the bar, recover into a fully upright stance with your elbows still in the rack position. Don’t develop the habit of putting the bar down before you have fully recovered and you have established control of the bar in the final position. If you’re in a big hurry to put the bar down after you rack it, you might soon find that you’ve gotten in a big hurry to rack it and start racking it wrong. Disaster follows close on the heels of such things. Finish each clean correctly.
    Power cleans are not like squats or deadlifts, movements that can be ground out to a bone-on-bone finish through perseverance and hard work. Even if a deadlift is a little out of position, you can lock it out by just pulling harder if you’re strong enough. The movement is slower and there is time to fix minor form problems before the pull is over. The clean takes less than a second to do, and if it is not right, it doesn’t rack. Cleans can be racked only if all the contributing factors are there: strength, power, and technique. Since the clean is a much more mechanically complicated movement, it is more sensitive to each contributing factor than the slow movements are. This fact is evidenced by the experience common to all lifters, who find that 100 kg is good for many attempts but