Why you shouldn't Power Clean?

[gemini929]

Did any of you see this Barbell Logic youtube video? : Why you shouldn't Power Clean

As a beginner over 40, some of the points raised seem to make sense. Has there been a larger discussion about this?

[Mark E. Hurling]

1. Did any of you see this Barbell Logic youtube video? : Why you shouldn't Power Clean

2. As a beginner over 40, some of the points raised seem to make sense. Has there been a larger discussion about this?

1. No.

2. Yes, as it relates to older lifters. Both all over this forum as well as in several of the books published by Aasgaard.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Scott is wrong about the first thing he says in the video: the program was absolutely not designed for high school athletes, because I have never had more than a handful of high school athletes in this gym at a time (I've talked about why this occurs before). I taught the Power Clean to every member of the gym who could learn it for decades, because I considered it important for reasons described in the blue book. And as I've mentioned many times on the website, in the books, and in the seminars, the Power Clean is not suitable for everybody. If you are older, injured in specific ways, or just don't have the time, don't clean. But don't fail to clean if you can and should just because you're not a younger athlete.

[chrisza]

I'm 45 and still active in baseball and basketball. I'm well capable of utilizing the PC, but can't quite get rid of arm pull and it ends up beating me up. I'm self taught on all the other main lifts via the blue book, but can't nail the PC. I will master it someday as I think it's a really fun and valuable lift if executed properly.

[Fulcrum]

Did any of you see this Barbell Logic youtube video? : Why you shouldn't Power Clean

As a beginner over 40, some of the points raised seem to make sense. Has there been a larger discussion about this?

yeah, they did a whole video on this already:

YouTube

and there has a been many forum threads regarding this.

[Michael Wolf]

Scott is wrong about the first thing he says in the video: the program was absolutely not designed for high school athletes, because I have never had more than a handful of high school athletes in this gym at a time (I've talked about why this occurs before). I taught the Power Clean to every member of the gym who could learn it for decades, because I considered it important for reasons described in the blue book. And as I've mentioned many times on the website, in the books, and in the seminars, the Power Clean is not suitable for everybody. If you are older, injured in specific ways, or just don't have the time, don't clean. But don't fail to clean if you can and should just because you're not a younger athlete.

Scott may not have been historically accurate with that comment, but I suspect there is a demographic aspect about what he says that is true in concept. Most people who walked into your gym from 1984-2004 are probably more athletically inclined, and less physically pussified, than the average person who, in 2019, seeks out a $200/hour session with an SSC in Seattle, SoCal, or NYC. This doesn't mean the North Texans were all especially athletically gifted at all, but just going by averages, since we're comparing large groups of people. My view of the human genome's average phenotypic expression of strength and athleticism took a large downturn when I started working as a personal trainer in NYC, and was reinforced when I started really focusing on coaching people in SS about 10 years ago. The number of people who came to me for a session, with high IQs and salaries, who were absolute motor morons and about whom I often wondered how they got out of bed in the morning without killing themselves, was in the hundreds and represented a small but not insignificant % of the total # of people I coached. I coached one guy for years who, every summer like clockwork, would take his bike out for a ride out on Long Island - not a vigorous course or in a pack of other riders jockying for position but a casual slow ride down the isolated and smooth path of his idyllic Long Island weekend home's neighborhood - and fall over and hurt himself. Every year. This is an intelligent, highly paid and highly placed man at a high powered, serious company. The people who were not that physically ungifted but were still decidedly below average was in the thousands, and represented the bulk of my practice, probably 50-60%.

I suspect your experience with people at WFAC was quite different than this, and I suspect mine is mirrored pretty closely by coaches working for premium rates in urban centers. This probably also strongly influences our opinions of what "average" is, and how many people out of 100 will end up making productive use of their time by power cleaning. I can say definitively for example, that the people who have attended the 50-odd seminars and 10-15 training camps I've staffed have been more athletic, on average, than the people who came to me for coaching in my private practice, and a higher % of them could learn to clean well enough to be a useful aspect in their training.

I totally agree with Rip that what we say to a generic question or as a general proclamation should be based on the presumption that you can and should clean unless demonstrated otherwise, because most of you goddamn HUMANS will do anything to get out of hard work and take the easy way out every time.

I also totally agree with Rip that in actual practice coaching, you do not rely on the demographic norms and averages of the group to whom the person in front of you happens to belong - that would be racist, sexist, and lots of other bad "ists," after all - but do your freakin job as a coach and make an actual evaluation based on their actual age, history, injuries, athletic attributes, etc... and come up with a solution based on the cost:benefit of all of those various factors.

This is more or less what Sully says too, IIRC, though it's been a while since I listened to that episode.

I think where people in this group who share a training philosophy really differ on this Q, probably comes almost entirely down to the demographics they've happened to see in their coaching experience. And the outcome is that some of us think the % of people who can and should clean is higher than others do, and probably none of us have the real, full picture because of the limitations of our viewpoints.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Scott may not have been historically accurate with that comment, but I suspect there is a demographic aspect about what he says that is true in concept. Most people who walked into your gym from 1984-2004 are probably more athletically inclined, and less physically pussified, than the average person who, in 2019, seeks out a $200/hour session with an SSC in Seattle, SoCal, or NYC. This doesn't mean the North Texans were all especially athletically gifted at all, but just going by averages, since we're comparing large groups of people. My view of the human genome's average phenotypic expression of strength and athleticism took a large downturn when I started working as a personal trainer in NYC, and was reinforced when I started really focusing on coaching people in SS about 10 years ago. The number of people who came to me for a session, with high IQs and salaries, who were absolute motor morons and about whom I often wondered how they got out of bed in the morning without killing themselves, was in the hundreds and represented a small but not insignificant % of the total # of people I coached. I coached one guy for years who, every summer like clockwork, would take his bike out for a ride out on Long Island - not a vigorous course or in a pack of other riders jockying for position but a casual slow ride down the isolated and smooth path of his idyllic Long Island weekend home's neighborhood - and fall over and hurt himself. Every year. This is an intelligent, highly paid and highly placed man at a high powered, serious company. The people who were not that physically ungifted but were still decidedly below average was in the thousands, and represented the bulk of my practice, probably 50-60%.

In concept, maybe. I know there has been an erosion in physical baseline since 1984, and North Texas is not New York City. But the model was not based on high school athletes, as Scott stated explicitly, and never has been directed at athletes of any age. That was the point of my comment. Your point at the bottom of the post is correct: too many coaches allow the demographics to decide who to use the power clean with -- "identity politics" as it were. It has become apparent to me that some don't like to coach the power clean because they're not comfortable with their ability to do so. It is wrong to assign responsibility to the client when the coach's experience is the problem. We are taking steps to correct this.

[VincePIC]

I coached one guy for years who, every summer like clockwork, would take his bike out for a ride out on Long Island - not a vigorous course or in a pack of other riders jockying for position but a casual slow ride down the isolated and smooth path of his idyllic Long Island weekend home's neighborhood - and fall over and hurt himself. Every year. This is an intelligent, highly paid and highly placed man at a high powered, serious company.

Was he one of these guys?

[Michael Wolf]

In concept, maybe. I know there has been an erosion in physical baseline since 1984, and North Texas is not New York City. But the model was not based on high school athletes, as Scott stated explicitly, and never has been directed at athletes of any age. That was the point of my comment. Your point at the bottom of the post is correct: too may coaches allow the demographics to decide who to use the power clean with -- "identity politics" as it were. It has become apparent to me that some don't like to coach the power clean because they're not comfortable with their ability to do so. It is wrong to assign responsibility to the client when the coach's experience is the problem. We are taking steps to correct this.

Ya, I glossed too much over the historical inaccuracy part in a rush to make my point. If it were me and my coaching and gym ownership history that was misrepresented, I'd be annoyed and want it corrected. Especially since that's such a rampant part of what the people who don't like us do, i.e. when they say things about about you like "Rippetoe has never coached any real olympic lifters." So certainly within our own organization and group we need to be more careful to be correct.

I did think you'd appreciate my point about the identity politics of coaching, though. I don't think I'm stretching here in the connection, it's just another way in which they're wrong, applied to our particular little profession. When you have a person in front of you, you evaluate the person in front of you, not the average of that person's various identity groups. It's almost ludicrous to imagine a barbell coach saying, well, you're in perfect health, you played college sports, you deadlift 575 and enjoy learning new and challenging physical skills. But hey, you just turned 40 yesterday and sorry, but that's just A NO GO ZONE for the power clean. The same level of stupidity occurs whenever people are evaluated by their group's average stats instead of their actual characteristics. BMI in lifters is another great example.

The lack of experience and comfort coaching the clean is an issue, but it is market driven. I had the opportunity to teach PE at a college for a few years, right before I took the seminar back 7-8 years ago, so got a bunch of experience that way. It was reinforced over 4 years of running my program in a crossfit gym, where a relatively high % of people were both willing and able to clean. But among the population who email or contact me specifically for the purposes of "learning Starting Strength," the % of people who actually want to clean is probably sub 10%. I never found it a good way to get repeat business to force these people to do something they didn't want to, and I only had the experience of teaching the clean to hundreds of people because I had somewhat unique circumstances.

I agree we need to take steps to correct this, because as you point out, a barbell and strength coach needs to be able to teach people who can and should, to clean and snatch. But the relative lack of opportunity is, I think, mostly market driven.

[Mark Rippetoe]

It is market driven, absolutely. But to the extent that we can drive the market, we should.