Clean and Jerk Technique Analysis

By Ryan Brown, Darkside Strength and Conditioning

Here is Bailee, one of our CrossFitters and soon to be Olympic Lifting superstars, working on her Clean & Jerk. This is #132, about 92% of her 1rm. Bailee is plenty strong right now but has only been working on her olympic movements with me for about 2 months. She is making steady improvements by getting lots and lots of lifts in. She has a tendency to make some mistakes that I see as pretty common thoughout the gym. So, check out what she is doing wrong and see if you are as well.

If you want your technique broken down in the powerlifts, Olympic lifts or a strongman event, send the raw footage (not a youtube link) to [email protected]

In picture 1 She has just broken the bar off of the ground and begins to push her knees back. This position doesn’t look too bad, but you can see that she is already starting to slide forward. Raising her butt too fast.

Picture 2 really tells the story of what is wrong with the clean. She starts her pull too early.

This leaves her hips too far behind the bar when she explodes, causing her to throw her hips forward rather than jump straight up.

Picture 3 shows the effect of the early pull. It looks like she is getting to full extension, but because her hips were so far behind the bar when she started her pull she had to swing them way forward. This has caused all her momentum to be moving forward and……

In picture 4 you can see that she has had to jump forward to catch up to the bar (compare feet in pic 1 to pic 4), and still doesn’t catch up enough to get the bar high on her shoulders in a good rack position.

Picture 5 shows the start of a good jerk. She shoves her hips back, keeps her weight on her

heels and has her chest pretty vertical. Then is picture 6 all of that goes to shit. You can see by the very forward angle of her shin that when she went to change directions she slid way forward. All of her weight is up on the ball of her foot and, it is hard to see from this angle, but her torso has more of a forward inclination. You can see from her final position that she threw the jerk way forward as well.

All in all, not bad considering this was around rep number 6 or 7 at a pretty high % of her current 1RM, but we still have tons to work on for her to be competitive on a national level.

Picture 7