The worst part to me is that the starting position is way off. The shoulders look as if they are actually behind the bar (they should be significantly past the front of the bar). This itself creates problems for the pull. Then of course she is catching it wrong, but she isn’t using a weight heavy enough to make catching it a problem. The starting position is the most fundamental part of the technique, and the form of it should be established in the first session(s) p.s I don’t think that looks like Merlene either, maybe its just the lighting.
Hahahha you should have seen her the first time she tried doing hurdle hops.
Exactly Jimbo, the shoulders are too far back. Need to be ahead or even on top(directly over) of the the bar but not behind during the initial stages of the lift. Though olympic lifts certainly require more instruction than the performance of a barbell curl, for example, I don’t find that they require entire sessions(as some feel) to achieve a fairly good level of proficiency. Just a little bit of proper lifting instruction could, no doubt improve many people’s technique significantly. Though it it would probably be more difficult to achieve with a “mature” athlete. Coaching should not be exclusive to the track.
Merlene’s technique is very similar to the technique used by many of the stronger names in weightlifting before the double knee bend came into use. During the 50’s and 60’s the rules did not allow the bar to touch the thighs hence a more straight legged second pull. The French hammer thrower Christophe Epalle also performs his cleans and snatches with a similar non-rebending of the knees. Granted the bar could stay a little closer to her body from the thighs to the rack position.
What loads for a 170 pound 200m athlete should be for CNS stress then? If they are doing medball power tosses then can submax submax work count? Any video of technique of athletes that are not olympic lift specialists?
number 2- who is that girl? did you speed up that clip or is she just that explosive?!
:o
when i do power clean, i tend to catch the bar in a wider foot stance. return to my starting stance and then lower. would this be considered proper technique?
T-bone,
She was the 1999 Pan Am Games gold medallist for her weight class (52 kg??), competing for Canada. The weight she is using in the demo is quite light for her, so there is very little need for her to drop under the bar. And yes, she is that fast. I couldn’t believe it when I was shooting the video.
Hmm I thought my form was bad…
I use a double knee bend, but the bar never touches my thighs 
extend your hips more/quicker
that is one ugly powerclean!!!
Second one is nice 
She is a great athlete, but her form on this lift is bad. The bar needs to graze the quad while in the process of the pull. She also does not have her elbows follow though at the top. I hammer my players when they are lazy and don’t complete lifts, like she is doing. There doesn’t seem tobe any explosiveness off the floor either acudave, newport beach
Should there not be more of a squat portion to the lift, basically when you catch the bar at the top of the phase do yo not drop below the bar and come down like a squat then stand up?
One of my biggest pet-peeves in strength & conditionning circles is the notion that olympic lifting must be performed in “true olympic lifter fashion”. The reason all non-OL athletes perform olympic pulls is to stimulate rate of force development, particularly in the posterior chain and scapular elevators. Many athletes will never have the elbow structure/shoulder flexibility to effectively catch a clean or snatch. I’m a former national level olympic lifter and that sort of inherent elbow rigidity got me out of the sport (my rotator cuff didn’t get along with the catch phase of the clean). My old track coach (I threw spears for 10 years previous to OL) has been to East-Berlin and attended coaching seminars that featured former East German throwers Ulf Timmerman and Udo Beyer. One of the things that struck him was the fact that some of these induviduals didn’t catch their OL pulls anymore. EG coaches felt that the catch phase was nothing more than an invitation to injury and only served to stroke the athlete’s ego as in “I can clean so much…”. Track & field athletes: pull hard, tight back, weight close to the body at all times… and let the weight drop to the ground! BTW, the featured female OL is Maryse Turcotte. I believe she has done about 115kg…she is also probably more drug tested (OCT) than any ofter female lifter in the world! (What it means to be Canadian!).
Maybe the OL heavies on the forum can comment further, but to me Merlene seems to be effectively ‘ripping’ the bar from the floor ground. By this I mean driving the weight up from the floor and ‘muscling’ it up with the upper body from there. There is a large contrast in techniques between the two (not just at the stage of the catch) but also as the bar crosses the knees of both athletes. According to Dreshler, at this phase:
“As the knees and ankles are fully extended the next body part to pull is the torso, upwards and back, as a consequence of this an opposite reaaction occurs in the knees and hips which move forward and down”
To my understanding, Dreshler is referring here to the double knee bend.
I may not be explaining myself very well but is this aspect of OL (which involves massive recruitment of those ‘money muscles’ in hips/hamstrings) not feature in OLs of all athletes whether the bar is caught or not?
Eric G,
Good point. I personally would rather see high pulls being used. Pick a landmark between the belltbutton and mid sternum, preferably closer to the mid sternum, and let her rip. I to have rotators that I “baby”. Anyway,it goes back to sports specificity. acudave L.Ac. Newport Beach, Ca
I know the that Cherles Staley is not the most popular man, on this forum, but I did read a good suggestion that he made. It involves doing pulls in a power rack, with some form of light elastic material (bungee cord) stretched between the frame. If you put these at a level that is appropriate, you can pull to the elastic, and you know whether or not you pulled to the appropriate level, thereby not wasting effort on poor pulls.
I know that early GPP season you would perfrom full squats and as season goes on you would go to 3/4 and 1/2 squats - would this theory also apply to power cleans?
Originally posted by coach_luc
I know that early GPP season you would perfrom full squats and as season goes on you would go to 3/4 and 1/2 squats - would this theory also apply to power cleans?
I wouldn’t do Power Cleans in the GPP. After a brief period of unilateral body weight work, I’d go to squats and deadlifts as the meat and potatoes. I think power cleans start to become useful as intensification builds meaning that you can spend less of your training “budget” in the gym and have more available “budget” for things like speed.
In the case of an athlete who hasn’t mastered OL movements 100% is there not a case of introducing them earlier for technique development purposes?
In the clinic in Boston Ian King stated that with the cleans that athlete should come down into a squat postion