Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [137]
If your flexibility is sufficient but you still cannot rack the bar quickly, you might just be reluctant to let go of the bar enough to permit the elbows to come up. All you need is a little relaxation of the hands and a willingness to quickly rotate all the way up into position a couple of times to see how it feels to do it right. Several mental tricks can help with racking speed. Imagine slamming your elbows into the hands of your coach. Sometimes it helps to aim your shoulders at the bar, or to hit the bar with your shoulders, like you’re trying to strike a blow even as the elbows come up. The crucial concept here is that the bar is not racked until the elbows point forward, and stopping the elbow rotation before it reaches this position is not acceptable.
At the same time the bar racks, the feet stomp the floor. Since the feet must break contact with the floor if a jump occurs, they must set back down on the floor, and thinking about stomping is a way to make this happen explosively – like everything about the top of the clean needs to be. This foot movement causes everything happening simultaneously with it to synchronize better. It feels better when the feet stomp and the bar racks at exactly the same time, and your body will time the rack to coincide with the stomp. And if the stomp is fast, it pulls the rack along faster with it. The simultaneity of the two events is fairly automatic, and not too many people will stomp out of phase with the rack because it just feels too weird. So the stomp actually sharpens the timing of the racking movement. A certain amount of knee bend, necessary to cushion the catching of the weight, will accompany the stomp. Catching the weight with perfectly straight knees is not desirable and actually doesn’t occur very often since it also feels too weird. The stomp thus makes the movement faster, while cushioning the catch.
The feet will stomp into a position that’s approximately the same as the squat stance, as mentioned earlier. In practice, this should mean a couple of inches per side wider. Some people will shift their feet out to a position wider, and perhaps much wider, than a squat stance. This is an attempt to drop lower under the bar, in lieu of pulling it high enough. You don’t get a good stomp going this wide because the angle is not conducive to stomping and the distance covered is so great that it takes too long. Stomping is quick; lateral splitting is not. Correct this error by stomping into your correct starting position footprints several times without the bar, and then focus on this foot position during the clean with a lighter weight that you can rack properly. Stubborn cases may have to actually attempt to stomp into the pulling-stance footprints, or even narrower, in order to get enough correction to eliminate the lateral split. A lateral split is a bad thing to choose as a habit: it is dangerous, hard to control, and ineffective. The purpose of the power clean is to pull the bar as fast and as high as possible. We don’t want to make it easier to get under the bar; we want to pull the bar higher. And if we were going to make it easier to get under the bar, we would use the standard squat or the split version of the clean, not some weird bastardized mutation thereof.
Figure 6-46. A lateral split is very common among novices and high school athletes who have never been corrected. It is often associated with other racking technique problems, such as bad elbow position and leaning back. It is corrected by giving the feet a job to do: stomp your feet back into your footprints or just a little wider.
Another stomping error involves pulling the heels up very high in the back and slamming them back into the platform, as if to merely make noise. From the side it looks like a knee flexion, certainly not an