Really dumb questions about pc's

[Koalala]

Hey after reading SSBBT I was a little bit confused.
Full squats seem to be good for the knees since the glutes and hamstrings take tension off them.
But if you're performing a powerclean you're basicly doing a quarter squat.

So how come powercleans are not bad for the knees?

[Force Production]

The weight is light and there's not really an eccentric phase, and...

[Bloodninja666]

They're not the greatest lift for your knees, actually... That's not to say theyre horrendously bad for them, either.

[misspelledgeoff]

i think the movement is quite different from a quarter squat- other than the knees being bent at the same angle. in quarter squat you put stress on the patellar tendon at the 'bottom' of the squat as you decelerate the bar and switch from eccentric to concentric. the pc has no such dynamic.

it still may not be great for the knees. but it's not bad for them in the same way quarter squats are.

[Dastardly]

I heard Tommy Kono mention that olympic lifters get worn knees first/more than other problems.

But I dont think its really an issue for us doing the odd power clean for training purposes.

Oly lifters are cleaning & jerking over the bodyweight everyday for years & years.

We clean a small fraction of what we squat. Oly lifters do massive weights often squat cleaning so deep that their knees are twisted.

Explosive movements can be extremeley stressful this combined with the less than ideal form of max attempts may cause injury.

But the power & forces us novices put out is piss weak in comparison. And we focus on perfect form unlike in competition. Its quite hard to fuck up the landing on a power clean (minimal squat) where we using a weight we know we can handle. But if we were to land with a twisted knee/vulnerable position even with a minimal weight, any of us could easily tear apart all the ligaments holding knee together.

But that would be a freak unlikely accident and is much easier to avoid than to do.