Power Clean vs Squat Clean for Athletics

The Olympic lifts (snatch and clean & jerk) and their variations belong in most any strength and conditioning program. Given the demands on athletes to move explosively and powerfully, using movements that must be done explosively/powerfully and which stimulate improved performance in these respects should be a no-brainer. The Olympic lifts and their variations have a number of benefits over some of their alternatives, including ease of progressive overload, minimal space and equipment requirements, ability to easily adjust intensities to create different stimuli (lower weight for higher reps, higher weight for fewer reps, moderate weight for higher peak power output, heavier weight for more strength focus, etc.), plus they're pretty darn effective¹. However, strength and conditioning professionals often disagree about the application of the "full" lifts (by which I mean a snatch or clean in which the athlete receives the bar in a full squat, aka a "squat clean" or "squat snatch") vs the power variations of the lifts (in which the athlete receives the bar with hips above parallel, in a partial squat position). 

Sidebar: Henceforth, I'm going to call a clean in which the athlete receives the bar below parallel a "squat clean." 
I've encountered a number of people who take issue with this nomenclature, so let me clarify. If you are one of these people that can't help but say, "oh, you mean a clean" whenever someone refers to it as a squat clean, please stop, because you're annoying and wrong. "Squat clean" is an accurate and specific term, and people who make a big stink about it and assert that the squat clean is "actually just called a clean, you uneducated swine" are a) technically incorrect, and b) needlessly argumentative, and probably just reflexively hate all things associated with or popularized by Crossfit (such as the term "squat clean") because the internet told them to. 
A "clean" involves bringing the barbell from the floor to the shoulders in one pulling movement and then standing up with it. Regardless of how low the hips are when the athlete catches the bar, it is a clean. "Clean" is a general term. If you want to specify where the bar is caught, you use modifiers such as "power" or "squat." In the sport of weightlifting, the competition lift is called the "clean & jerk" because it doesn't matter whether athletes catch the bar in the power position or in a full squat. Squat clean = squat clean. Clean = squat clean, power clean, etc. Cool? Cool.

Before I go any further, I want to mention that before anyone is allowed to contend which variation is better for athletes, two things should be kept in mind.
First, regardless of which variation an athlete performs, good form should be top priority. In the long run, a clean that looks like a limbo performance gone awry will not be doing much for strength, power production, or not having a broken spine, regardless of which variation is performed. Don't be that guy/gal.
Second, if athletes are consistently doing some variation of the Olympic lifts (and doing them with good form), they are 90% of the way there. The rest is only minutiae, and is far less important than doing them at all and doing them well.

But, I like talking about minutiae, and so here we are.

When comparing the power clean with the squat clean, I assert that for athletes–specifically, athletes who are not performing the Olympic lifts as part of their sport (namely, weightlifters, Crossfitters, GRID athletes)–the power variation of the clean is superior. There are a few reasons for this.

1. The power clean is easier to learn and coach.
The squat clean is considerably more technical and difficult to perform than the power clean. The timing, accuracy, speed, mobility, and guts required to pull oneself from a position of full extension to a deep squat in a fraction of a second in order to receive a heavy barbell on the shoulders requires a huge amount of talent and practice. While these attributes–timing, accuracy, speed, mobility, and guts–are all hallmarks of talented athletes, the time and energy spent teaching a linebacker or a point guard the specifics of how to perform a squat clean safely and with heavy loads will generally be better spent training other more sport-specific aspects of performance. The power clean, while certainly not the most simple of movements, is like a scaled down version of the clean in respect to its learning curve. A properly executed power clean will certainly challenge timing, accuracy, speed, and to some degree mobility and guts, but to a much lesser extent. There is also a larger margin of error in the power clean, meaning that small mistakes or inefficiencies in technique will not be as potentially detrimental to the athlete or the training stimulus. A bar caught an inch in front of an athlete's center of gravity in the power clean will be fairly easy to correct for with a quick step; a bar caught in inch out front in the rock bottom of the catch of a squat clean will not be so forgiving. So, while athletes who are already proficient in performing the squat clean could certainly benefit from including it in their training, athletes who are inexperienced with the Olympic lifts will be better off sticking to the power clean. 

2. The power clean involves more of an active deceleration component (in a position that is common in sports). This is a point that doesn't get nearly as much attention as the others, but I believe is a primary benefit of the power clean over the squat clean for application to sports. In the power clean, because the bar must be caught with hips above parallel, the athlete must quickly and actively resist the downward acceleration of the bar using his/her legs, hips, and trunk. If the athlete does not actively resist against the bar, it will drive him/her down into a deep squat (and, if the athlete did not have a braced torso, the bar would subsequently drop to the floor). While the squat clean does involve some active deceleration, much of the deceleration occurs because the athlete drops to a rock-bottom squat–to end range. Here, as the athlete catches the bar, their trunk is actively involved in resisting the bar's downward acceleration (the athlete must brace his/her trunk to stay upright and keep the bar on the shoulders), but the primary resistance from the structures of the legs and hips come from those structures being in end range. 
In the video below, note the forceful deceleration of the bar in the catch of the power clean.

In addition to requiring more of an active deceleration, particularly from the legs and hips, the positions in which the athlete must quickly and forcefully decelerate the bar in the power clean closely mimic common positions in most sports–hitting a baseball, tackling, shoulder checking, driving against a lineman, jumping, landing, breaking a tackle, taking a hit, throwing a punch, etc. All share similar positions to the catch of the power clean. On the other hand, the position in which an athlete catches the bar in the squat clean, while sometimes seen in sports (close approximations to the deep squat positions may be regularly seen in wrestling, grappling, occasionally in American football), is far less common. 

3. The power clean produces higher peak power. 
Unfortunately, I could not find a study comparing power output in the power clean vs. the squat clean in trained athletes. (If such a study does exist, someone let me know, please. If not, maybe I know what I'll be doing for my graduate thesis now.) However, there are a number of studies examining peak and average power output at various loads for the power clean. From these studies, we find that peak power occurs somewhere around 60-90% of power clean 1-rm (with results seeming to lean towards the 70-80% range)^{2 3}. While this doesn't give us a direct comparison of power output in the squat clean vs. power clean, it does tell us that light loads (<60%) and very heavy loads (>90%) in the power clean produce lower peak power. Because the squat clean allows heavier weights to be moved than the power clean, and because the bar velocity is slower and the distance the bar travels is shorter in the squat clean, we can reasonably conclude that peak power output will be lower in the squat clean than the power clean. The speed at which the bar must be moved in the power clean (in order to pull it high enough to be caught with hips above parallel), along with the relatively heavy loads that can be used make the power clean an excellent candidate for developing power.

The squat clean is an excellent exercise, and those who are already proficient in this movement would be well-served to include it in their training on a regular basis alongside the power version of the lift. However, given that most athletes don't enter a high school or college strength and conditioning program already competent in performing the full Olympic lifts, and given the power clean's superior carry-over to most sport applications, the power clean is a better choice for athletes whose sport does not include the performance of the Olympic lifts.

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1 TRICOLI, V.; et al (2005). SHORT-TERM EFFECTS ON LOWER-BODY FUNCTIONAL POWER DEVELOPMENT: WEIGHTLIFTING VS. VERTICAL JUMP TRAINING PROGRAMS. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research (Allen Press Publishing Services Inc.), 19(2), 433-437.^↩
2 COMFORT, P., FLETCHER, C., & MCMAHON, J.J. (2012). DETERMINATION OF OPTIMAL LOADING DURING THE POWER CLEAN, IN COLLEGIATE ATHLETES. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), 26(11), 2970-2974.^↩
3 MCBRIDE, J.M., HAINES, T.L., & KIRBY, T.J. (2011). EFFECT OF LOADING ON PEAK POWER OF THE BAR, BODY, AND SYSTEM DURING POWER CELANS, SQUATS, AND JUMP SQUATS. Journal of Sports Sciences, 29(11), 1215-1221.^↩

From the Hip #3 - Basic Principles for Healthy Eating

I recently watched “Forks Over Knives,” a documentary-style advocacy film promoting a low-fat vegan diet (or, as they phrase it, a “whole foods, plant-based diet”) as a panacea to America’s rampant health problems: diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc. The movie states, in no subtle terms, that all of our health problems are linked to the consumption of animal products. It covers the stories of a few everyday people who had great success with adopting the prescribed low-fat vegan diet (as well as other significant lifestyle changes) and the work of two of the main players in the medical and scientific community that are at the forefront of the push for these dietary prescriptions, Dr. Campbell (the author of the infamous “China Study”) and Dr. Esselstyn. Overall, the evidence cited in the movie is far from scientifically sound. I won't go into great detail about it in this post, but I will say that most of the cited evidence provided to support the film's recommended diet and to condemn the consumption of all animal products is either grossly misinterpreted or rests on scientific procedures of a caliber that would maybe crack the top 10 at a 6th grade science fair—not great. 
But the film was not all bad. In addition to making a few very good general points that we could all benefit from hearing (namely: the power of diet in the prevention of disease, and the fact that we should all be eating more plants), it really got me thinking about how we think and talk about diet today. While many of us have every intention of making well-informed, scientifically-based decisions about our own dietary choices, the reality is that sifting through all the dietary science out there still does not leave us with a clear-cut “ideal” diet. Perhaps this is because there is no ideal diet (I’d put my money on this option); perhaps it’s because the scientific community is still working to hone its testing methods and understanding of human biochemistry (I believe this is part of it as well); most likely it’s some of both. Regardless of the reasons, even the scientists who are most immersed in nutrition research find themselves juggling handfuls of contradictory pieces of evidence as well as unclear and ever-changing ideas. Certainly there are some principles that are well-established and supported to the point that we can safely consider them substantially conclusive universal prescriptions: the ill effects of consuming massive amounts of processed sugar, large amounts of alcohol, and diets extremely deficient in certain nutrients would fall into this category. But beyond this, we are left in the center of a shouting match between different parties arguing for their dietary beliefs and interpretations, and often it sounds more like a squabble over cultish dogma than a discussion rooted in scientifically-substantiated principles. Vegan, raw food, vegetarian, high-carb, low-carb, high-protein, low-protein, high-fat, low-fat, Paleo, Atkins, IIFYM, Keto, fruititarian, Mediterranean, etc. Everyone seems to think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

Taking a good hard look at the science and a nice big dose of common sense, I think there are a few basic principles that can set us on the right path to developing our own healthful dietary habits:

• Eat a balanced diet of whole foods rich in nutrients. If you eat whole foods (minimally processed) rich in nutrients—things like vegetables, wild-caught seafood, eggs, whole-food starches, fruits, and pastured meats—you’re going to be doing better than about 98% of the population. Eat these foods in balanced proportions (in other words, if 90% of your diet is fruit, or meat, or any one food, you’re probably doing it wrong) and be reasonable about it all (if you’re following a diet that says eating fruit is going to kill you or a filet of wild-caught salmon will give you cancer, it’s time to change).

• Experiment with what works well for you. Isolate foods to eliminate from your diet for a week or two, reintroduce it, and see if you notice any positive or negative changes. Do the same with relative proportions of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Do the same with supplements, liquid calories, meal timing, etc. Everyone is different, and there’s a lot you can learn about yourself with a bit of self-experimentation. Don’t think that you’re intolerant to gluten or don’t handle animal fats well because someone else is. Experiment, listen to your body, and see for yourself. Also, if something serious happens (i.e., you can’t breathe, you turn purple, your joints seize up) every time you eat a particular food, stop experimenting for a second and see a doctor. There’s a time for self-experimentation, and there’s a time where anaphylaxis is about to kill you.

• Stop worrying. (Extreme food allergies withstanding) I maintain that stressing and worrying about the minutiae of your diet can undo all of the good that a healthy diet does for you. If you are having a full on crisis because you accidentally ate some gluten, or avoiding social situations that may have some of your no-no-foods, or putting yourself on an incredibly restrictive diet for no reason other than the internet told you to, all to the point where you’re left feeling isolated, distressed, and hugely inconvenienced because of how many things you won’t allow yourself to eat, you're doing it wrong. Does this mean you should just eat McD’s and Coldstone every day and not give a damn about it, and you’ll be healthier for it? No. Don’t be dumb. Follow the above two principles, eat well, be happy, and stop freaking out when you find out that the low carb dish you just ate actually had some brown sugar in it. You're gonna be okay. 

Maybe some day the nutrition science community will finally be able to “crack the code” and figure out, to the most intimate detail, exactly what the human body needs to thrive, and then we’ll all eat specially-formulated nutrient packs and live forever, but probably not. So while you’re waiting for science fiction to happen, follow the above principles, be smart and self-aware, and be happy and confident with your choices. 

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From the Hip #2 - Read More

You should read more. And I should read more. Everyone should read more. Why?
1. Reading gives you a chance to "visit" another person's mind. And if you're reading the right things (translation: not Internet message boards), it can be a chance to "visit" the mind of a great thinker. Most published authors have something valuable to contribute—certainly some more than others—and when we get to go inside and poke around the mind of a great thinker, there's a good chance we might be able to walk out with something of value. For the same reasons, I think it's important to read different things. If you only ever read from the same few authors or from one genre, you're going to be exploring the same mind, the same cluster of ideas, the same viewpoints over and over. This is certainly better than nothing, but exposure to new ideas, challenging ideas, and new perspectives and ways of thinking provides the opportunity for more growth and discovery.
2. Reading gives you a chance to pick up on patterns. This ties in closely with my first point. The beautiful thing here is that patterns tend to be universal. This means that whatever you're reading, there's a good chance you'll be able to pick up on some patterns and relate it back to what you care about. If fitness is your shtick, you don't need to just read books about fitness. In fact, you shouldn't just read books about fitness. Read fiction books, read non-fiction books, read scientific tomes, read fantastical fictions, read historical biographies, whatever. Expose yourself to more ideas from more people (again, preferably not the people on Internet message boards), and some of these patterns will start to pop up and stick in your mind. These patterns will rise to the top of your consciousness and you'll start to see them in everyday life, see how they work, see why they matter, and use them to better yourself.
3. Reading forces you to focus on a single thing. When you read, you really can't do anything else. And if you're trying to read and listen to the radio and brush your teeth at the same time, stop. Part of the beauty of reading is that it's an activity that, by nature, requires near full attention. If you're doing a bunch of other things while you read, then I'd say you're not really reading—maybe you're 1/3rd reading if you're lucky, and you're really selling yourself short. Reading requires stillness and attention, and in this way it is a very meditative activity (and for this reason, it can sometimes be a very difficult activity, too). It requires your mind to shut out all the other crap that's bouncing around and to immerse itself in concrete ideas, in a fictional world, in a character, in a philosophy, etc. In this sense, reading is a type of training for the rest of life. It is an exercise in making you a more intentional, aware, and focused being, and this skill can be applied elsewhere. Am I saying that reading can make you better at squatting or a better spouse or a better businessperson? Yes, maybe I am. So do it.

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From the Hip #1

This begins a new series of posts, which I am dubbing "From the Hip," in which I post something brief on a regular basis—perhaps a few per week, I've yet to officially decide on that. It will be, as the title suggests, shot from the hip—a quick shot of whatever's on my mind, whatever I've been thinking about lately, what I've been trying, what I've been inspired by, questions I have, or answers that I think I've discovered that I will surely realize I was completely wrong about in a few months. It will generally be short, to the point, and without much of a filter. Some days may just be a sentence or two, others may snowball into something much bigger. But the point is, it'll be regular and it'll be from the hip. 

I'm doing this for two reasons:

1) For me. I tend to go through cycles of self-confidence and self-doubt in my own writing. By committing myself to posting something that I am acknowledging and defining up front as short, unfiltered, unrefined, and frequent will "force" me to sludge through my periods of self-doubt and keep producing content, and I recognize the immense importance of that.

2) Also for me. Writing makes me a better person. Writing will make you a better person (so do it, every day). The act of committing a thought to ink (or, in this case, pixels) compels us to think critically about things, to look inward, and to become more comfortable with ourselves. One of the hardest things about writing is looking back at things we wrote a long time ago. It's a snapshot of who we were at the time. Though others may not see it as clearly, between lines of text lie volumes about struggles you faced, doubts you had, triumphs you wanted to parade about, ideas you were focused on, changes you were chasing after; and if you're the type of person who is constantly pursuing positive change in your life (and you should be), looking back at who you were a year ago, two years ago, ten years ago can be hard. It can be downright painful—that red-in-the-face, hot cheeks and clammy hands, "my God, what sort of foolish monster was I?!" feeling of embarrassment. It's almost as bad as looking back at pictures from your freshman year of college when you had braces and grew your hair out and wore a faux-fur-lined denim jacket you bought at the thrift store (no, just me?). But it should really be looked at as a tool and as a privilege, not something painful or embarrassing. A tool to learn from yourself, past and present, to propel you forward faster and with more drive, a tool to learn to be okay with yourself, okay with who you were and who you are (because after all, when you're okay with yourself, looking back at an essay you wrote in high school is hilarious); and a privilege to see how you've grown, how much you've changed, and how much you look forward to changing and growing more. 

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