Clean Barbell Warm-up
Here’s my recommend barbell warm-up for the clean.
Rack deliveries to focus on pulling the bar in to be able to spin the elbows around quickly.
Tall muscle clean to work on keeping the bar close, and pulling in to allow a quick turnover without crashing.
Front squat to warm up the legs and work on perfect posture and balance.
Then optionally, clean-grip overhead squats to help with upper back mobility for better posture.
Then even more optionally, Sots press to really push thoracic and lower body mobility.
Finally tall cleans to work on aggression and speed, and actively keeping the bar close and bringing it back in the turnover for maximal elbow speed and a smooth delivery to the rack.
Some of you are going to struggle to do rack deliveries with a 20/15kg bar, so you can either do some more tall muscle cleans, or use a lighter technique bar if you have one.
This covers just about everything, but make additions, omissions and alterations to address your own needs.
For example, I find the squatting here gets my hips prepped well enough, but you may need to add some kind of hinging like an RDL, or you may want to do some hang cleans.
One time through this with 5 reps of each exercise should be plenty, assuming you’ve done a more general warm-up previously (which I would recommend), but more than that won’t hurt.
And no, you don’t have to do it all continuously as fast as possible like I did here for the sake of minimizing video time. Definitely take the time to ensure you’re doing each rep as well as possible—this is not just warming you up, but training/priming optimal movement.
Rack deliveries to focus on pulling the bar in to be able to spin the elbows around quickly.
Tall muscle clean to work on keeping the bar close, and pulling in to allow a quick turnover without crashing.
Front squat to warm up the legs and work on perfect posture and balance.
Then optionally, clean-grip overhead squats to help with upper back mobility for better posture.
Then even more optionally, Sots press to really push thoracic and lower body mobility.
Finally tall cleans to work on aggression and speed, and actively keeping the bar close and bringing it back in the turnover for maximal elbow speed and a smooth delivery to the rack.
Some of you are going to struggle to do rack deliveries with a 20/15kg bar, so you can either do some more tall muscle cleans, or use a lighter technique bar if you have one.
This covers just about everything, but make additions, omissions and alterations to address your own needs.
For example, I find the squatting here gets my hips prepped well enough, but you may need to add some kind of hinging like an RDL, or you may want to do some hang cleans.
One time through this with 5 reps of each exercise should be plenty, assuming you’ve done a more general warm-up previously (which I would recommend), but more than that won’t hurt.
And no, you don’t have to do it all continuously as fast as possible like I did here for the sake of minimizing video time. Definitely take the time to ensure you’re doing each rep as well as possible—this is not just warming you up, but training/priming optimal movement.
