Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [138]
After you rack the bar, recover into a fully upright stance with your elbows still in the rack position. Don’t develop the habit of putting the bar down before you have fully recovered and you have established control of the bar in the final position. If you’re in a big hurry to put the bar down after you rack it, you might soon find that you’ve gotten in a big hurry to rack it and start racking it wrong. Disaster follows close on the heels of such things. Finish each clean correctly.
Power cleans are not like squats or deadlifts, movements that can be ground out to a bone-on-bone finish through perseverance and hard work. Even if a deadlift is a little out of position, you can lock it out by just pulling harder if you’re strong enough. The movement is slower and there is time to fix minor form problems before the pull is over. The clean takes less than a second to do, and if it is not right, it doesn’t rack. Cleans can be racked only if all the contributing factors are there: strength, power, and technique. Since the clean is a much more mechanically complicated movement, it is more sensitive to each contributing factor than the slow movements are. This fact is evidenced by the experience common to all lifters, who find that 100 kg is good for many attempts but 105 just will not rack. Finishing the pull collates all the factors involved in the pull, and causes them all to come together at the right time to contribute to racking the weight. The slow movements rely on absolute strength – the simple ability to generate force in the correct position – at their limit capacity, while the quick lifts utilize the ability to apply maximum power at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place. These are two distinct skills, producing different types of training stress, and resulting in two different types of adaptation. Recognizing this difference between the slow lifts and the explosive lifts is fundamental to your understanding of barbell training.
After the rack
After the clean is racked and recovered, the bar must be dropped safely, without destroying you or your equipment. The method used here will depend on the equipment. If a platform and bumper plates are available, as they should be, the bar can be dropped from the rack position in a controlled manner. Care should be taken to prevent the bar from bouncing away from where it is dropped; you do this by keeping the bar level on the way down. While the bar is dropping, your hands should not leave it until just before it gets to the floor. Bars that are released at the top and allowed to free-fall are much more likely to bounce unevenly than bars that are tended to as they drop. Free-falling bars are also much more likely to get bent by the “whip” that occurs as the bar contacts the floor unevenly and the shear force of the deceleration propagates down the length of the shaft. Even an expensive bar can be warped this way.
Figure 6-47. Bumper plates are designed to make the explosive lifts safer for the lifter and easier on the bar and platform; they absorb the shock of the drop so that the bar can be lowered by dropping rather than through the use of an eccentric effort, as was necessary before the invention of the equipment. But bumper plates must be used correctly so that the bounce can be controlled. As a general rule, don’t let go of the bar until it is just above the floor.
If bumper plates are not available, the task becomes harder. The bar must be released from the rack and caught at the hang, and then lowered to the floor, to prevent damage