Clean and Jerk

🎯 Shoulders🏋️ BarbellExpertCompoundAbdominals (2°)Glutes (2°)Hamstrings (2°)Lower back (2°)Quadriceps (2°)Traps (2°)Triceps (2°)

How to do the clean and jerk

  1. With a barbell on the floor close to the shins, take an overhand or hook grip just outside the legs. Lower your hips with the weight focused on the heels, back straight, head facing forward, chest up, with your shoulders just in front of the bar. This will be your starting position.
  2. Begin the first pull by driving through the heels, extending your knees. Your back angle should stay the same, and your arms should remain straight. Move the weight with control as you continue to above the knees.
  3. Next comes the second pull, the main source of acceleration for the clean. As the bar approaches the mid-thigh position, begin extending through the hips. In a jumping motion, accelerate by extending the hips, knees, and ankles, using speed to move the bar upward. There should be no need to actively pull through the arms to accelerate the weight; at the end of the second pull, the body should be fully extended, leaning slightly back, with the arms still extended.
  4. As full extension is achieved, transition into the third pull by aggressively shrugging and flexing the arms with the elbows up and out. At peak extension, aggressively pull yourself down, rotating your elbows under the bar as you do so. Receive the bar in a front squat position, the depth of which is dependent upon the height of the bar at the end of the third pull. The bar should be racked onto the protracted shoulders, lightly touching the throat with the hands relaxed. Continue to descend to the bottom squat position, which will help in the recovery.
  5. Immediately recover by driving through the heels, keeping the torso upright and elbows up. Continue until you have risen to a standing position.
  6. The second phase is the jerk, which raises the weight overhead. Standing with the weight racked on the front of the shoulders, begin with the dip. With your feet directly under your hips, flex the knees without moving the hips backward. Go down only slightly, and reverse direction as powerfully as possible.
  7. Drive through the heels create as much speed and force as possible, and be sure to move your head out of the way as the bar leaves the shoulders.
  8. At this moment as the feet leave the floor, the feet must be placed into the receiving position as quickly as possible. In the brief moment the feet are not actively driving against the platform, the athletes effort to push the bar up will drive them down. The feet should be split, with one foot forward, and one foot back. Receive the bar with the arms locked out overhead. Return to a standing position.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.

Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the abdominals brace the trunk so force can pass between the hips and the shoulders; the glutes finish hip extension; the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.

The lower back, quadriceps, traps and triceps take a share of the work as well.

Every exercise for:ShouldersAbdominalsGlutesHamstringsLower back

How this movement works

The working muscles shorten as they drive the load away from you, and more than one joint changes angle to do it. Load spreads down a chain instead of sitting on one muscle, which is why a compound push handles more weight than any single-joint alternative — and why joint position, not the muscle, is usually what fails first.

It is filed under olympic weightlifting. The bar must move fast enough for you to get underneath it, which makes this a skill rather than a grind: low repetitions, well short of where fatigue starts editing technique.

What you need

A barbell locks both hands to one bar, so neither side can drift and the load climbs in plate-sized steps. That makes it the simplest way to add weight and the least forgiving thing to bail out of.

Every exercise using:Barbell

These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:

Difficulty

Listed at expert level. It asks for range, stability or speed that takes time to build, and it punishes a rushed set-up much harder than an easier movement would.

Of the 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 7 are listed at expert level.

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Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.