How To Clean... Correctly

In today's video, we are going to be going over how to do the clean the right way. There's gonna be no fluff, nothing extra. This is exactly what you need to do. So if you ever get lost or you wanna know how to do the clean, this is your resource that you're going to use from now on. Now, before we get into it, I have just uploaded a four-week clean program. Three workouts a week, and it gives you all the exercises and instruction you need to take what you learn in this video and apply it to the clean. So in four weeks, you can be comfortable every time you see clean on the program. Let's get into it. So the way we are gonna work this one is from the ground up. We're gonna start with the bar on the floor, and we're gonna establish our start position. So ideally, we want the feet to be about hip to shoulder width. Some people like a little bit wider, some people like a little bit closer, but as long as your feet feel like they're right under the hips or the shoulders, you're good to go. From there, we don't want a grip that is too wide. Having a super wide grip is going to inhibit our front rack position. The wider we go, the more demand on our mobility we're gonna find. So we wanna find a grip that is comfortable, that allows us to get the elbows nice and high. So for me, I use about a thumb width grip, and that allows me to get to a position in the front rack to where I can get the elbows nice and high. If I take the grip a little bit wider, then when I get to the front rack, it's very hard for me to get my elbows up. This is gonna result in bad cleans. Our grip needs to be about thumb width or whatever it is for you that allows you to get those elbows nice and high. Now that we have our grip sorted, before we grab the bar, we wanna look down, and the bar should be right on top of the ends of our shoelaces. I'm gonna give you guys a video of what you should see when you look down. Once we have that established, we're gonna reach down and grab the barbell. Next, we're gonna let the knees go forward, and we're gonna get the shoulders right on top of the bar. This is a position that is going to allow us to push with those legs. If we are over the bar too far, that's gonna throw us off in the start position. If our hips are too low, that's gonna throw us off. We want the shoulders to be directly on top of the bar with weight distributed evenly through the feet. So my checkpoints for the starting position, bar right over the ends of the shoelaces, get a proper grip, let the bar stay there, drop the hips and bring the knees forward, shoulders right on top of the bar, weight even through the feet. From here, we can feel that activation in our quads, which is exactly what we want. Let's talk about the first pull. The way I like to tell people to think about the pull off of the floor is to think of it as a leg press. So if you look at this angle over here, when I pull the bar off the floor, you'll notice that my torso angle stays consistent and the only thing that's moving are my legs. So I get set and we just push with the legs. Some errors you'll see is we'll start with the shoulders too far over the bar and the shoulders are gonna end up rising faster than the hips. That is wrong. Or we'll start with the hips too low and we'll see the hips shoot up off the floor like that. That is wrong. If we do either of those things, that tells us that we are not using the legs properly. What we wanna see is the shoulders and the hips rising at the exact same rate. And I want you to think of pushing the floor away from you as if you're doing a leg press. So you just feel the quads push into the ground and we do that until we are just above the knee. That is our first pull. All it is is we get to that proper start position and we push into the floor like we're doing a leg press until the bar is above the knee. That's it. While doing this, we wanna feel the tension in our mid back, in our quads and in our lats. What we don't want is feeling a ton of tension in our arms, in our upper back. We don't want this movement here. We want the chest up, the quads. We want to push. That is the first move for the clean. From there, we are going to get to our power position. So what we have to do for that to happen is we have pushed to this position perfectly. If we get to this position properly, the chest should be right on top of the bar, the feet should be flat. Now all we have to do from here is we have to keep the bar centered over our center of gravity. We have to let the knees come through and bring the shoulders back just a bit. The second move is simply this. We take the shoulders, we switch from the chest being on top of the bar to the shoulders being right on top of the bar. This is our power position and you'll notice if you look at the side angle, the ankle, the barbell and the shoulders are in a perfectly straight line. Now we do want to make contact in the clean but where we make contact in the leg depends on your proportions. If you're a lifter like me, with longer arms and a shorter torso, you're gonna be making contact about mid-thigh. If you're a lifter with a longer torso and short arms, you could even be making contact in the hip. But what matters is that we hit the power position that works for us. And a good checklist for your power position is to make sure that the shoulders, the barbell and the ankle are in a straight line with flat feet. Depending on your arm length, that could change where we make that contact. But as long as the fundamentals are in check and we have a good amount of knee bend, we're good to go. Now, where do we go from there? How do we get the bar from that power position to our shoulders? I'm gonna give you two analogies here and it's gonna make perfect sense. The first one, I want you to imagine when we get into that power position that there is a beach ball right here. Someone's holding a beach ball over your head like this and I want you to think of bouncing that beach ball straight into the air. So we're in our power position, beach ball's right there. You wanna bounce that beach ball straight into the air. With a barbell in hand, it's gonna look something like this. And you can see how when I do that, I try to bounce that beach ball in the air. I'm not whipping the shoulders back. I'm not adding any extra movement. We imagine the ball's there. We punch the quads into the ground and we try to bounce that ball vertically. Now we're gonna pair that move with what I call pulling up your pants. When we pull up our pants in the morning, we take our pants and we pull them up like this. The knuckles are down, the elbows come up here. We do not ever pull our pants up like this, ever. If we get to our power position and we go to extend, we wanna bounce the beach ball and pull our pants up. Doing that properly keeps the bar over the center of gravity and makes the turnover much, much easier. From there, we have the pull all the way until we're at the chest. How do we get under the bar? I want you to think about sinking the bar, landing on the shoulders and your feet hitting at the exact same time. But make sure we go through everything we just talked about. Don't skip any steps. So when it comes to getting that bar in the front rack, I don't want you to just do this. Let's go through all the steps that we just talked about because that's what a clean needs to be. We get to our good starting position, shoulders right on top of the bar, flat feet, feel tension in those quads. We push till we're above the knee. Then we get to the power position. Then we bounce that beach ball, pull the pants up and we continue pulling the pants up until we're about chest height. Then once you feel that bar start to pass the chest, we snap the elbows around and we want the feet to hit right when the bar lands on the shoulders. So I'm gonna show you what it looks like in real time. Again, one more time. Now the most common question I get is how do we transition that into a full clean? You've done all the hard work. Now we just have to meet the bar and ride it down. Do not think that we're pulling the bar this high and catching it all the way down here. That's not how it works. We're pulling the bar to a fixed point, we're meeting the bar there and then we're riding it down. So it's gonna look something like this. Not like this. Cause then we crash. So what I want you to think about, meeting the bar at a fixed point, catching it there, timing the bar landing with the feet hitting and then riding it down into the squat. One of the most common things I see is a jump back in the clean. We go to extend and we jump away from the bar. Why is that happening? Because we're not using the legs we get here and instead of punching those legs and bouncing the beach ball, we take the hips and we throw the hips forward at the bar. Because we do that, our body goes, we're hitting this thing forward, we gotta pull it back. So we're gonna pull back like this. That's gonna tell us to jump away. Bad stuff happens. So if that's your problem, really focus on the extension. A great drill you can do, it's called the tall clean. Essentially, all it is, we pick the bar up, we're standing straight up, we're gonna pull the pants up and jump under. If you struggle in the transition, the bar crashing, jumping back, jumping forward, that drill right there is your bread and butter. Do it constantly. If the hips are shooting up off the floor, think of forcing your chest up the whole time and really trying to feel those quads. Shoulders right on top, push the quads off the floor. What is really important with this is that you go through the sequence in its entirety. You don't skip any steps. If you try to jump ahead, you don't push with the legs long enough, you don't get to a true power position, you don't extend fully, then things are gonna get thrown off. So everything we talked about, when you're doing the program, make sure you are hitting those positions perfectly and with intent. If you need to come back to this video, do it. That way you can go over what needs to happen in the clean while you're going through the program. My three big things I want you guys to focus on, even foot pressure, keeping your shoulders on top of the bar and keeping those elbows up for as long as we can in transition. If this video helped you, please leave a comment. It means the world to me. If we get 1000 comments in one week, I will post the how to jerk video. Thank you guys for watching. And if you want the program, click the first link. Bye bye.