WOD 5/7/10

3 Rounds

15 Hang Power Cleans (135/95)
15 Burpees

One from the mainsite to wrap up the week. As always, it's Fun Friday! Work on your HPC's prior to the workout. Spend the time to work on the proper mechanics of the movement and the barbell.

The HPC is tremendous for developing explosive strength. Why? Consider the range of motion in which you must create A LOT of momentum on the barbell as it hangs at the hips. Truth of the matter being you only have a sseveral inches of room to create a all the acceleration and elevation on the barbell needed to get it up and momentarily weightless so you can pivot under it. From a standing position, you need to dip, transition, and explode upward and slightly back in triple extension to get that barbell to travel up and over, while you pivot around the bar and it settles on the shoulder. The trick being that as the bar gets really heavy, you are forced to pull under the bar very quickly and not rely on the height of the barbell to give you the time to do this.

Now think about taking that bar from the ground to do the same thing. There's a whole bunch more travel room - from the floor to the point of triple extension - for the barbell to gain momentum and get up to the shoulders. The little bit more acceleration means you can get under the bar a bit more cleanly due to a split second more time it has in the air. The regular power clean is less demanding on a pure explosive action from a standing, dead stop than the HPC. It has been my personal experience that if you wish to get better at regular cleans at heavy weight, working on heavy HPC's. The vicious extension you will learn to do, coupled with the ability to learn to pull yourself under the bar really fast, will make a full squat clean that much easier when the time comes.

On a final note, at heavier weights (85%+ 1RM) you will only be able to do 2-3 reps of HPC's before form breaks down and things have the opportunity to go awry - this is true for any variation of heavy Cleans and/or Snatches. At lighter weights, you can get more out of the reps, but be smart about it.

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