“My college strength coach said the power clean was really good for explosiveness. Why don’t you use the power clean in your program?”

Because I’m not a strength coach.

That’s not a rub against strength & conditioning coaching. I love S&C coaches and I love the profession.

I mean strength isn’t my focus when I work with an athlete. Improving performance is my focus.

(By the way, I’ve written on this topic somewhat more poetically before.)

STRENGTH TRAINING OR POWER CLEAN TRAINING?

I absolutely believe strength is the master quality, the glass that all other performance qualities are contained within, and far and away the easiest individual quality to develop.

Those three concepts are the fundamental problem and are why I don’t use the power clean – or any Olympic lifts at all – in my programming.

Strength is the master quality because it represents how coordination ties your body together. A base of general strength means, as an athlete, you can reliably and smoothly execute any movement. The better coordinated you are – producing motion and generating force – the better you can perform any sport skill. And up to physiological limits, being so generally applicable is why strength is so easy to develop – if you lift a heavier weight at the same speed or lift the same weight faster or can perform a skill with poorer leverage at the same effort, you are stronger. Just about everything works because strength is so simple!

The power clean, though, is a complex movement. While its benefits include being great for explosive hip extension AND being measurable in units of weight on the bar, its risks include injury to wrists, collarbones, and knees when done without proper preparation. But this article isn’t a knock on the power clean either, I love the exercise!

Its most important risk is time.

COMPROMISES IN TRAINING

An athlete who comes to see me, almost by definition an adult amateur late in their competitive career, has painfully little time to train. Because strength is a proxy for coordination, they almost always need to get stronger in order to achieve their other goals, the other forms of coordination they seek: jumping power, top speed, technical consistency, reaction time.

Every minute I spend improving wrist & shoulder mobility to support the rack position or moment I spend drilling the bar turnover for the power clean is a moment I didn’t spend working on the hip mobility that cuts their sprint stride short or patterning their footwork to better sense a defender’s position.

Further, the weeks I would spend stabilizing technique in the power clean with weights well below the athlete’s actual capacity (presumably in exchange for the future objective insight that they are stronger and more powerful when real PR weights increase over time) are weeks that I couldn’t spend on maximum effort broad jumps, single-leg takeoffs, and medicine ball throws at appropriate volumes to build power.

Every athlete, every season, and every training session, I’m looking for the most efficient way to solve that person’s problem in least time. I don’t use power cleans for the simple reason that I can do other things in less time that have the same effect – or, sometimes, a better effect.

COMPETING CHOICES IN TRAINING

I can teach an athlete a strict deadlift, the kettlebell swing, safe box jumping, and a half-dozen medicine ball throws, in addition to acceleration posture and basic top speed mechanics in the same 2-4 hours of training that are needed to even introduce the power clean.

Later, if the athlete really wants to know or if we’re approaching their limits with the exercises above, teaching the power clean will be relatively easy. We still won’t *need* it for athletic performance, but we’ll have it as an option.

I’ve never been a college strength coach. Maybe, if time allowed, facilities were available, and I had 1-5 years with the same athletes, I’d feature the power clean more prominently in my programs. But things as they are, I have to decide – which, I remind myself frequently, means “to cut away.”

PRIORITY AND DECISIONS IN TRAINING

I am obsessive about looking for the least I can do with an athlete to improve their performance. My motivation comes from pride first, I’ll be honest: doing more with less is a personal mantra. But it also has to do with contingency planning: if the athlete moves or their gym closes or they travel for work or the roads are unsafe or the weather sucks…what can they still do to get better?

My priority is to help athletes perform, not to only teach things I like, to follow trends, or adhere to dogma. Since the biggest limitation on my ability to realize that priority is my athletes’ available training time, I am forced to decide.

And my decision, for over 200 athletes since 2013, has been to not teach the power clean.

That can make my programs pretty boring, yet they work.

As a weightlifter, the power clean is an essential variation on my competitive movements that I need in my training for developing specific strength.

For strength athletes, the power clean is a fine primary or accessory exercise to support movements in their sports.

And if I were a strength coach – used in the sense that we say basketball coach or swim coach or sprints coach, meaning, a coach in the sport(s) of strength – then I would teach the power clean as a sport technique.

But you’re not a strength athlete and you didn’t come to me to become one…
…because I’m not a strength coach.