Small town with sorry gyms

[Che'lu]

I live in a small town and my gym doesn't have bumper plates for me to do power cleans. I've been doing fine by lowering it manually instead of dropping. But at a point now where it's kinda rough lowering it. Do I suck it up or do I substitute it for another workout??? Thanks.

[Dastardly]

Suck it up. You can always deload your cleans to make it less taxing to lower them.

[PFerrari]

Suck it up. You can always deload your cleans to make it less taxing to lower them.

What's the point of de-loading the power clean if the only issue is lowering the weight?

To OP, I'd try to suck it up for as long as you can. As long as you are not putting yourself at risk of injuring yourself. Once it becomes absolutely too hard/unsafe to lower, I'd suggest some sort of dynamic effort deadlift. As long as you're not training for olympic lifting (I assume you're not), I think dynamic effort style deadlifts provide the same type of explosive power development that power cleans offer. Justin Lascek has recommended similar things.

[crc]

How much are you power cleaning? You might be able to deal with this by tweaking your lowering technique. Make sure you're lowering from the rack to the hang position, controlling the descent, and catching the bar on your thighs instead of letting your arms deal with the majority of the load. I'm not moving a ton of weight but this still works fine for me with 195 pounds.

[subwindow]

How much are you power cleaning? You might be able to deal with this by tweaking your lowering technique. Make sure you're lowering from the rack to the hang position, catch the bar on your thighs and control the descent. I'm not moving a ton of weight but this still works fine for me with 195 pounds.

I would advise against catching with your thighs. I've got a bruise on my right thigh that's about 7 inches in diameter. It's all sorts of pretty colors of yellow, green, blue and purple. I'm only at 145 pounds.

I'm currently attempting to let it drop from the rack position and then catching it in the hang position, and attempting to slow it down using a movement similar to the first quarter of a romanian deadlift. This is probably not the safest way to do it, but it's better than thigh bruises.

[melody]

I would advise against catching with your thighs. I've got a bruise on my right thigh that's about 7 inches in diameter. It's all sorts of pretty colors of yellow, green, blue and purple. I'm only at 145 pounds.

I'm currently attempting to let it drop from the rack position and then catching it in the hang position, and attempting to slow it down using a movement similar to the first quarter of a romanian deadlift. This is probably not the safest way to do it, but it's better than thigh bruises.

Thigh bruises are better than arm or shoulder injuries.

[Bryan Dobson]

I have never used bumper plates. Just lower the damn weight, you should be able to catch it in the hang position and lower it from there under control. If you can't control the weight call it failure. It's no big deal.

[crc]

I would advise against catching with your thighs. I've got a bruise on my right thigh that's about 7 inches in diameter. It's all sorts of pretty colors of yellow, green, blue and purple. I'm only at 145 pounds.

I'm currently attempting to let it drop from the rack position and then catching it in the hang position, and attempting to slow it down using a movement similar to the first quarter of a romanian deadlift. This is probably not the safest way to do it, but it's better than thigh bruises.

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Yeah, edited mine for clarity since it could be interpreted as literally just catching the bar with your thighs. If you do this right the bar doesn't hit your thighs hard enough to cause bruises and doesn't put that much strain on your arms/shoulders/neck either.

How much are you power cleaning? You might be able to deal with this by tweaking your lowering technique. Make sure you're lowering from the rack to the hang position, controlling the descent, and catching the bar on your thighs instead of letting your arms deal with the majority of the load. I'm not moving a ton of weight but this still works fine for me with 195 pounds

[Dastardly]

[QUOTE=PFerrari;603074]What's the point of de-loading the power clean if the only issue is lowering the weight?

If the weight is so heavy that it is impossible to lower safely, then I would take a guess that the trainee could reduce the weight and still get a good training benefit out of cleaning it. Using better technique and more power/speed. The heaviest weight does not always equal the most power recruitment but it does often mean sacrifices in technique and speed.

I could be wrong but I get the impression that Che'lu must be going so heavy that things are getting ugly. Otherwise why would it be a problem to lower the weight?

[PFerrari]

If the weight is so heavy that it is impossible to lower safely, then I would take a guess that the trainee could reduce the weight and still get a good training benefit out of cleaning it. Using better technique and more power/speed. The heaviest weight does not always equal the most power recruitment but it does often mean sacrifices in technique and speed.

I could be wrong but I get the impression that Che'lu must be going so heavy that things are getting ugly. Otherwise why would it be a problem to lower the weight?

True, you could get some benefit out of reducing the weight and doing power cleans. But if the purpose is to provide some type of power/explosive movement, I would argue that switchign to some sort of dynamic deadlift is better in order to keep driving the heavy (regular) deadlift. If you want to keep PC's in programming for fun, use them as a warm-up for the DE deadlifts. But eventually if you can't use enough weight on the power clean, there will not be enough stimulus for the deadlift potentially.

There may be a technique breakdown if the weight is too high but that's not the question here. Speed will have to improve in order to successfully power clean the weight. If you go slower as the weight goes up you will miss the weights. I don't know what a slow power clean looks like with heavy weight. They don't exist. You can't do a slow power clean once you get past the point of being able to upright row it.

Che'lu gave no indication that his technique was ugly for cleaning the weight. (It may need work, but that's a separate issue). Lowering the weight is much harder than getting it up. Why do you think Olympic lifters drop/throw/slam the weight from the top of the jerk instead of lowering it? Are they doing it ugly? Because of gravity/the nature of the lift, it can be hard to lower the weight smoothly without damaging the bar/plates/floor when using metal plates. I've power cleaned 114 kg at a bodyweight of around 80 kg, and I can tell you that it would be ugly if I tried to lower it so as to not drop it at all.