What do power cleans do

Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Taraji P. Accessible Beauty Products For All. Rachell Smith. Power cleans come with a ton of badass benefits. Kristin Canning Kristin Canning is the features director at Women's Health, where she assigns, edits and reports long-form features on emerging health research and technology, women's health conditions, psychology, sexuality, mental health, reproductive justice, wellness entrepreneurs, women athletes, and the intersection of health, fitness, and culture for both the magazine and the website.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Bone-Shattering Grip Strength. Since the exercise requires you to hold onto heavy weights at high velocities, you can greatly improve your grip strength. A Full Body Workout. This Olympic-style exercise requires the coordination of every muscle group in the body. In time, the exercise adds muscle density and functional strength over your entire body with an emphasis on the shoulders and posterior chain — traps, back, glutes, hams, calves.

So whether you are looking for a highly effective sport-specific exercise or just another great exercise to add to your weight lifting arsenal, you simply cannot go wrong with the power clean. Of course, the power clean also will enable them to get considerably stronger at the same time.

The power clean strengthens a great many more muscles than nearly any other exercise. When you pull the bar from the floor to your waist, you work your legs, hips and lower back very directly.

Then the middle and upper back and shoulders and arms come into play as you finish the movement. In addition, because the power clean is a dynamic movement, you activate the muscles, tendons and ligaments in an entirely different manner from when you do a slower, more deliberate exercise.

It will make anyone a better athlete, and those athletes who possess a high degree of the attributes mentioned above excel at the lift right away. The Vesper Boat Club of Philadelphia, the highest ranked rowing club in the country at the time, used the power clean as a test for anyone wanting to join the team.

After I ran them through a workout, I would tell the coaches who the best athletes were. I used the power clean as my gauge. The coaches would be surprised that I had ranked the players in the exact order in which they had been drafted even though I had not seen that list before I trained them. I stated that I start all my athletes on this exercise, and that includes my female athletes because power cleans are just as beneficial to the fairer sex as they are for males.

In this case, the idea of a compound exercise has been taken to the extreme. If you are looking for a single exercise that works most of the body to one extent or another , this is an exercise that will serve you well. The only bad thing about this exercise is the fact that it requires a little more precision.

The power clean is a relatively complex exercise. This complexity is the price you pay for an exercise that does so much at one time. Not only will it work a variety of muscle groups, but it will also force you to practice balance and coordination. For convenience, the process is normally divided into four stages. Start with a loaded barbell on the floor in front of you. Stand with your feet about as wide as your hips. The barbell should be touching your shins at this point.

Bend your knees and squat down to grab the bar with both hands. You should be using an overhand grip, and your arms should be hanging straight down.

Try to resist the urge to look down, as your head needs to be pointed straight ahead for proper bone alignment. Once you are in the proper starting position, extend your legs and stand up, bringing the loaded barbell upwards in a straight line.

Your grip should not change, and your arms should not bend at this point. Raise your heels slightly from the ground, and use a contracting motion to shoot the bar upwards with as much explosive power as you can manage.

This is a difficult thing to describe, so this video might be helpful. As the bar is raised upward, squat down and catch it as it falls. You should end with the bar resting on your collarbone, with most of the weight being supported by your arms. The hands are palm-up at this point, and the legs are in a full squat.

The lower part of the arm should form a straight line so that your triceps run parallel to the ground.