Clean & Jerk Weight Lifting Tips

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Aaron Hale at Fitness for Life in Wilmington, North Carolina again to demonstrate for you today the clean and jerk. The clean and jerk very similar to the snatch lift as far as how we address the bar bell or address the weight. Our feet are going to be just underneath the bar bell or our toes really not our feet, but our toes will be just underneath the bar bell and again we need to know how to properly perform a squat in this position. People want to grab the weight like this and use their back to lift it up and that is not the way we want to perform the clean and jerk. The clean and jerk is all predicated upon being able to perform a squat efficiently so a squat again we are just here in this position. You have got to have a soft knee, our feet are outside of our shoulders and we just keep the weight in our heels. We want 90 to 95% of our weight in our heels and just press up, straight through our heels so that is the squat so we drop down engage our gluts and press straight up as we perform that movement. Again 80 to 95% of our weight needs to be in our heels in that moment, our chest stays back behind our knees. So considering that we can do that and we can perform that properly now we are ready to perform a clean and jerk movement. It is very much like the snatch lift. We are going to start from there and we are going to end up above our heads. The only difference here is we are going to incorporate what we call a clean. The clean is we are going to take the weight, come up our legs and then once we get to just above our knees and about mid thigh and we are going to shift the weight or I'm going to shift the weight up across my shoulders and my clavicle or collar bone as we are most familiar with it so shift up around our deltoids and our clavicle, keep the weight here and then we're going to lift the weight above our head. So again come down to our address position, the hands come outside of our feet by a fairly significant amount, six to eight inches, almost as far out as we can grip. We will bring the weight shift it up and then press. One more time with that, we are going to get right here, come down, hands stay outside of our feet, we are going to pick it up and clean it, what we call the cleaning movement so lift, clean and jerk. And that is the clean and jerk."