You should be doing most of them from the hang if your just starting out, will get you to use your hips and extend. Power cleans from the hang, power snatch from the hang are great exercises for anyone to do. They might not look perfect but you’ll get the hang of them faster then a full clean from the ground, or full snatch from the ground.
Thanks all
I guess ill try tomorrow some power cleans.
[quote]KBCThird wrote:
redivote wrote:
well, im looking for a ballistic exercise in order to improve my athletic ability, mainly sprint running and velocity.
jump squat is my only option, because i dont have any coach that can teach me power clean/snatch.
my concern is that this drill seems a bit hard on the knees…
People, for the love of all thats holy, stop buying into the BS that the clean and the snatch are some sort of arcane knowledge known only to the initiate.
This is a pet frigging peeve of mine, but if you can do a deadlift, an RDL, a front squat and a vertical jump, then why the heck can you not clean? Watch videos of olympic lifters, they’re all over the internet, and right now there is literally HOURS of footage from the games on NBC’s website.
Will your form be perfect? No, but guess what, neither is your squat form (or any other number of exercises,) and I hope you’re still squatting.
You wanna clean? Then I don’t care if there isnt a coach within a thousand miles of you, teach yourself - you wont be the first, nor the last.[/quote]
I feel the exact same way. I never understood why so many coaches say that the olympic lifts and their variants are dangerous or too time consuming to do properly. I also don’t agree that a dynamic box squat or similar movement is the equivilant of a clean and/or snatch.
I haven’t trained with the snatch much, but I think the clean is damn near unbeatable for enhancing strength and power while making one a better athlete.
I have never understood the fascination with the Olympic lifts. I don’t think they’re that important.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
I have never understood the fascination with the Olympic lifts. I don’t think they’re that important.[/quote]
Have you ever given them a serious run? And more importantly, who’s that in your avatar?
olys and jump squats = waste of time
just practise jumping instead
[quote]WhiteFlash wrote:
Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
I have never understood the fascination with the Olympic lifts. I don’t think they’re that important.
Have you ever given them a serious run? And more importantly, who’s that in your avatar?[/quote]
I’m not going to lie, I’ve never given them a serious trial.
It’s not really that I don’t feel that they’re useful, I just feel like more often than not, whatever quality you’re looking to train through the Olympic lifts can be trained more specifically through other means.
And it’s Mia Michelle in my avatar.
[quote]CoolColJ wrote:
olys and jump squats = waste of time
just practise jumping instead[/quote]
CoolColJ, I’m interrested in your opinion on this. Do you feel this way about jump squats across the board, or that they’re only a waste of time in regards to jump training? Do you feel they are effective in improving strength-speed for sprint accelerations?
I think most importantly is to practice your landing first with depth hops.
Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater but proper progressions is needed before you do a jump squat.
If you use your joints to soften the impact, it’ll lead to alot of complications later on with your knees…
of course there are many ways to skin a cat, no harm trying it but if its not working for you then change to something else.
If you’ve never tried, you’ll never know.
Olympic lifts, KB swings and platform plyos have worked for me so far… but the apart from that i do more strengthening work then power.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
CoolColJ wrote:
olys and jump squats = waste of time
just practise jumping instead
CoolColJ, I’m interrested in your opinion on this. Do you feel this way about jump squats across the board, or that they’re only a waste of time in regards to jump training? Do you feel they are effective in improving strength-speed for sprint accelerations?
[/quote]
explosiveness is highly movement and skill specific
jump to jump higher
sprint to sprint/accelerate faster
That sorts out your movement efficiency needs
to improve your horsepower you can apply in the movement, get stronger. But make sure you recover, then you can fully display your power.
By ditching the olys and jump squats, you have one less thing to spend your training time on, and less to recover from. Your going to have to jump/sprint anyway, so why bother with extra stuff that is not needed?
[quote]CoolColJ wrote:
Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
CoolColJ wrote:
olys and jump squats = waste of time
just practise jumping instead
CoolColJ, I’m interrested in your opinion on this. Do you feel this way about jump squats across the board, or that they’re only a waste of time in regards to jump training? Do you feel they are effective in improving strength-speed for sprint accelerations?
explosiveness is highly movement and skill specific
jump to jump higher
sprint to sprint/accelerate faster
That sorts out your movement efficiency needs
to improve your horsepower you can apply in the movement, get stronger. But make sure you recover, then you can fully display your power.
By ditching the olys and jump squats, you have one less thing to spend your training time on, and less to recover from. Your going to have to jump/sprint anyway, so why bother with extra stuff that is not needed?[/quote]
I’ve experienced decent results by using oly’s and jump squats and at other times by not using them. Your definitely right about jumping being most important for your jumping abilities.
When I did jump squats, low volume, it was immediately following the completion of either a squat or deadlift session (consisting of only heavy squats of deadlifts). I could be wrong about the usefulness but I could almost touch a basketball rim with the my elbow.
Edit: After reading up on some additional information I want to put a disclaimer in regards to my comments. I was beastly strong and still am semi-beastly strong so my experiences may or may not related to someone else’s training.
Well if your strong your gonna be able to jump high anyway if you practise jumping regularly
all olys and jumpsquats do is supposed to teach your body to use your strength in a fast manner.
Which sprints and jumping does anyway!
But more specific and even faster velocity wise
Ive seen a guy do a jump squat and forget to hold the bar tight. It came down on his neck and he looked like he hurt.
But if you’re better on the velocity side of the F-V curve, but want to do some work for RFD in addition to the strength work you’re doing, you’re probably better off doing something closer to the F side, or at least towards the middle. Jumps=way towards velocity. OL’s and jump squats=more towards middle.
if you work on both ends of the curve, the middle moves up too!
forces developed in the middle range depend on max strength.
That’s why as your squat goes up, so do your olympic lifts
jumping is actually in the fast/middle range as the human body is heavy.
The heavier the object needed to be propelled, the greater the need for strength.
The same applies for sprint starts and acceleration
Shotputters are benching over 500lbs just to throw a shotput over 60 feet, where speed is more importnat since the shot is quite light relatively speaking.
So think about about how much strength you need to throw your bodyweight 3-4 feet into the air…
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
I have never understood the fascination with the Olympic lifts. I don’t think they’re that important.[/quote]
Ask any strength and conditioning coach in the country. In fact, go to any division 1 weight room and count the number of platforms they have. If you want to increase your speed, agility, and vertical, they are the lifts to perform.
Fine, I’ll go to James Smith’s weightroom, and, what do we have here? A D1 program that doesn’t use Olympic lifts! Also, many football players get SLOWER when they start training at a school that does a lot of squatting and power cleans.
This has been hammered to death, and if you’re saying that you have to perform O-lifts to get fast/powerful well, you’re flat wrong.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
Fine, I’ll go to James Smith’s weightroom, and, what do we have here? A D1 program that doesn’t use Olympic lifts! Also, many football players get SLOWER when they start training at a school that does a lot of squatting and power cleans.
This has been hammered to death, and if you’re saying that you have to perform O-lifts to get fast/powerful well, you’re flat wrong. [/quote]
if you say there is any single lift required to get fast/powerful then you are flat out wrong. You can get results from nearly any program as long as it covers enough crucial areas and you put in enough time and intensity (i.e. hard work). However that doesn’t mean all programs are equal. Some training routines will produce the same or better results with less effort. Olympic lifting training may not be a requirement but if you want to improve power, explosiveness and speed then they are hard to beat.
IMO you may want to wait until you have more training experience before you make calls on what is necessary or not. To be honest I used to think Olympic lifting was over-rated but really it was more about me not wanting to spend the time learning the techniques involved. Once I seriously put in the time to train movements though I found they made a significant improvement to my explosiveness while competing in judo/grappling and playing rugby.
This is really the point I was trying to make, but you said it better.
However, I stand by my statement that they are unnecessary. That’s great that they worked for you, and I’m not saying they wouldn’t for anybody else, but it’s also great to be able to identify exactly what you want to train, and find specific ways to do it, and not just “Uh, I’m doing power cleans to get more explosive.” Because, what does that even mean?
Cleans are core to any sort of explosive movement. There’s a reason heavyweight olympic lifters have 40"+ verts and can run faster than the wind. What other proof do you need? Get with the times.