By Brian Stuart, Warrior Life Fitness
When people hear the words power clean, they often picture Olympic weightlifters, football players, or high-level athletes throwing heavy barbells around. And yes, power cleans are used in sport. But that is not why we teach them at Warrior Life.
Most of us are not training to compete in weightlifting. We are training to move better, get stronger, and age well so we can keep doing the things we care about for as long as possible. Most importantly, we want our training to prepare us for the unexpected movements and physical demands we encounter while doing the things we love. That is where the power clean becomes really useful.
A power clean teaches your body how to create force efficiently while developing the coordination and control needed to manage fast movement safely. It integrates the whole body, teaching your legs, hips, core, back, and arms to work together. It teaches timing, coordination, posture, balance, and speed.
Those things matter when you hike, climb stairs, shovel snow, carry groceries, move furniture, lift a bag of dog food, or catch yourself when you trip. When you lose balance, your body will move quickly whether or not you have trained that capacity.
Most of us would prefer not to spend a week lying on an ice pack simply because we had to jerk a steering wheel quickly in traffic, or catch ourselves halfway through tripping over a root on the trail.
Power is crucial to long-term health
Power is the ability to use strength quickly. You can be strong, but if your body is slow to react, that strength may not help you when life happens quickly. Slipping on ice, stepping off a curb awkwardly, catching yourself on a trail, or lifting something before it shifts in your hands — those moments require coordination and power. Another advantage of training power movements is that they keep the nervous system sharp. Training power allows us to safely move with speed, control, and confidence.
However, we cannot train power recklessly. We do not max out our power lifts. To train speed, we master the technique before adding load. Most of you have heard me in sessions: “Speed is earned.”
Three Key Benefits of Power Cleans
Improving the hip hinge
We have trained our deadlifts, we swing our kettlebells, and some days we can increase the load and feel pretty darn good. But are we moving efficiently? Are we cheating? Are we using the low back to do work the legs and hips should be doing? Can we maintain a braced core throughout the lift?
By training the power clean, you learn to properly recruit the hamstrings and glutes. You learn to maintain a strong, braced trunk during faster movement, helping your hips and legs produce force while your spine remains controlled. You learn to translate the strength in your legs to a safe lift, instead of yanking with the arms.
Training power cleans gives you better deadlifts, kettlebell swings, and everyday lifting. It teaches your body to recruit the right muscles at the right time.
Creating coordination
A power clean is not just strength with a bit of speed thrown in for flavour. It is a movement skill. It does not just increase muscle capacity; it builds whole-body integrity.
To perform the power clean, you have to connect the legs, hips, torso, and arms in the right sequence. You have to create force through the floor, keep the bar close, brace your core, and move quickly into a strong receiving position. That coordination is extremely valuable.
Long-term fitness is not only about how much weight you can lift. It is about how well you lift. Can you control your body? Can you react quickly? Can you learn new movement patterns?
A special bonus that comes with power training is that your body starts learning how to change in other ways too: gaining strength, building core integrity, improving balance, and increasing whole-body coordination.
Mobility with a purpose
Mobility is more than flexibility. It is also about the ability to get into position quickly and safely, with control. The power clean requires mobility in several areas. You need ankle and hip mobility to properly receive the bar. You need postural strength to keep the chest up. You need shoulder and wrist mobility to find a comfortable front rack position. You need core control to keep the body stable while you are lifting the weight. Most of us lack some facet of mobility to do a full barbell clean beautifully on day one. That is why we learn progressions.
We focus on the technique. We master the power clean with a PVC pipe or a lighter bar. We work from the hang instead of the floor. We take time to train the receiving position and adjust if our wrists and elbows are not quite there yet. We may spend time on front rack mobility and landing mechanics.
What we never do is force our body into a position it is not ready for. We earn speed, building our strength and mobility over time.
Finding that first perfect power clean
There is a sense of confidence and achievement that comes from your first proper power clean. It is hard to explain, but you will know when you experience it.
You will have combined the hinge, the core brace, the quick pull, the rack, and the receiving position into one movement that uses almost every major muscle group and joint complex in your body.
And it will feel very, very good.
The power clean can feel intimidating at first. It looks too technical. It looks too fast. People often think, “When the heck am I ever going to need that?”
Most adults know they need strength. They know they need cardio. They know they need mobility. But they rarely realize they need power until they feel it coming back. And here’s a movement that trains all of the above.
Our strength is about more than grinding through workouts and blasting our heart rate — although, okay, that is a certain kind of fun. 😄
True strength is holistic. Whole body fitness is about more than muscle. It incorporates timing, posture, coordination, speed, control and confidence.
The changes we’ve seen in people learning the power clean over the past several weeks have been, in a word, magnificent. I love watching our athletes grow into this lift, and I’m looking forward to seeing where your progress takes you.
For those of you who like to geek out, there is also evidence behind this approach. One study found that ten weeks of weightlifting-style training improved participants’ ability to produce force rapidly, although the way they adapted differed according to their initial power-clean ability.
For the rest of you, I’ll see you at our next power clean session! 😉
