'Very few, if any, other strength exercises involve more articulations,' says veteran T Nation coach Christian Thibadeau. 'Lifting explosively can help.'įor bodybuilders, the answer is also yes, but for different and somewhat more nuanced reasons: 1 – Cleans recruit more muscles than standard gym exercises 'Athletes have to react to any change in their playing environment quicker than their opponent,' says T Nation contributor Matthieu Hertilus. The movement pattern may not precisely mimic anything you'd do on a field or mat, but the total-body power it helps you develop is useful in just about everything. If you're an athlete, power cleans and other modified Olympic lifts get an enthusiastic thumbs up. But, unless you played sports in college or dabble in CrossFit, chances are you haven't yet tried them, or done them with the frequency and intensity it takes to see results. Six Reasons to Get Your Clean OnĪs I said, you aren't that guy. You notice that everyone in the weight room has stopped to watch, including the gym's trainers, who seem convinced the guy has broken a rule, even if they can't decide which one. The lifter bangs out three more reps before he sets the bar on the floor and steps back to catch his breath. You've certainly never seen an American lift like this. It looks like something you once saw a 4-foot, 10-inch Bulgarian do in the Olympics, except that lift somehow ended with the bar over the little guy's head. He descends into a full squat, then rises back up until he's standing straight with 135 pounds of metal sitting next to his collarbones. But then he suddenly straightens his body and shrugs his shoulders while rising up on his toes, flinging the bar up the front of his legs and torso before ducking down into a squat as the bar lands on the front of his shoulders. First he pulls it past his knees, which doesn't seem terribly odd. He crouches over the bar, with his knees bent and back more or less parallel to the floor. Since you've rarely seen anyone in this gym lift a weight from the floor, you have to stop what you're doing and watch.

He loads an Olympic barbell with a 45-pound plate on each side, and sets it on the floor. Picture yourself in the gym one morning or evening, going through your usual lower-body routine of leg presses, leg extensions, and leg curls, when you see a guy do something completely foreign to your eyes. You aren't that guy, of course, but just for a moment imagine that you are.

If you learned everything you knew about training from your local Bally's or 24 Hour Fitness, you could be forgiven for thinking that a squat is an exercise performed in a Smith machine with a padded tube wrapped around the middle of the bar, or that a pull-up is something you need a special body-weight-neutralizing machine to perform, or that 'mixing things up' means doing preacher curls before incline curls, instead of the other way around.

The clean master