[quote]eggsurplus wrote:
Cleans are core to any sort of explosive movement. There’s a reason heavyweight olympic lifters have 40"+ verts and can run faster than the wind. What other proof do you need? Get with the times.[/quote]
Ah yes, this quote again. Heavyweight olympic lifters have 40" verts and run faster than the wind because they do cleans.
I think this is #5 on my “what makes a great vert thread” list. I’ll have to find that one again.
[quote]eggsurplus wrote:
Cleans are core to any sort of explosive movement. There’s a reason heavyweight olympic lifters have 40"+ verts and can run faster than the wind. What other proof do you need? Get with the times.[/quote]
I’m sure their massive squats help. And I think that is the substance of this debate: Is it the cleans that get you a great vert/speed, or all the squats you need to do to get that big clean? I think it is hard to deny that if an athlete got a big squat, sprinted, and jumped he or she would not be missing anything by avoiding cleans.
That said, I do think that cleans are a fun exercise to do and may be the next best thing for athletes that do not have access to a track/field to sprint on in the winter months. In other words, if you were limited solely to weightroom work to develop your speed or vert, squats and cleans would be a solid combo.
I’m going to throw in my $.02 on the debate.
I’m an athlete at a D1 level who had never cleaned before. After coming here and cleaning for a while I noticed my 40yd dash time drop by more than 1/2 a second.
You tell me if they worked or not.
[quote]Schmazz wrote:
I’m going to throw in my $.02 on the debate.
I’m an athlete at a D1 level who had never cleaned before. After coming here and cleaning for a while I noticed my 40yd dash time drop by more than 1/2 a second.
You tell me if they worked or not.[/quote]
Well they obviously worked. Olympic lifters do run faster than the wind after all…
Well in my opinion, they work. But they’re just another tool in your toolbox. For someone like me, I’d use them during the colder months when I can’t get out on the track, like someone else mentioned. Do you need them? Nah. Would it be good to use them? Sure. Just know when to use them. No need to do everything in a workout.
Kelly Baggest wrote what I consider an excellent article on the Olympic lifts which presents everything much better than I could. Let’s see if I can find it.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
You have to be pretty uncoordinated for the jump squat to be dangerous.[/quote]
or have knee and back issues, like over half the world.
Sounds like your problem. Don’t tell me I shouldn’t do something because that guy over there can’t.
I think there are “money” lifts- lifts that are tried and true, get-you-strong lifts- for example, bench press, barbell rows, weighted pull ups, good mornings, squats, deadlifts and DL variants.
There are also neat tricks- lifts that are unique physical challenges that have seemigly no carryover to any other lift- single leg work, old style stongman shit like bent presses come to mind here. Eschewing single leg work might be sacrilege to the functional strength crowd around here- but, sorry, I am yet to see anybody get really strong doing these they just get better at doing lunges.
I would put jump squats in the latter group rather than the former. I have seem people do them, but never anybody strong- and I have never met anybody that, in looking back over their years of training, has said “jumping squats made me strong”.
Just my opinion/observation.
Then again, hey- give it a try. If nothing else, a guy that can jump squat 600 can probable do at least that much with his feet stuck on the ground.
It’s my understanding that most people do not use jump squats to get stronger. They’re not a maximal strength exercise. Instead, most use them to improve speed-strength or strength-speed.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
It’s my understanding that most people do not use jump squats to get stronger. They’re not a maximal strength exercise. Instead, most use them to improve speed-strength or strength-speed.[/quote]
You know- I’ve heard these terms thrown around by folks that really seemed to know their shit. However, when I have applied these concepts to my own observations, the truth seems to be pretty simple- strength is strength.
Let me explain. I bench 400 raw and not much more- guess what- on my 405 the bar moves real slow. A friend of mine benches 550 raw. When he benches 405, the bar flies up. By the same token, when I bench 315 for reps, the moves fast. However, when my best bench was 335, by 315 was still kind of a grinder. How did my 315 get fast? Simple- I got stronger- I went from being a low-300s bencher to being a 400 lb bencher. I can apply this reasoning to my other lifts and I have seen same thing in other lifters I train with.
This not to say that explosive sub-maximal weight lifts won’t make you faster. They will. But they do this by making you stronger.
I agree for the most part with what you are saying and I think that many people would be better off served by just getting stronger.
From what I have seen, most athletes are just weak and the quickest way to improve somebody’s vertical leap is just by simply getting the squat up to about 1.5x bodyweight while maintaining jump proficiency.
However, I think there is a time and place for exercises just as jump squats or reactive squats. I have seen gains in explosive strength by using them in short blocks of 2-3 weeks at the conclusion of a lengthy strength phase where I gained a significant amount of max strength.
Let’s not forget the importance of the strength-to-weight ratio. Big squat + relatively light bodyweight = big vert/fast sprint.
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
Sounds like your problem. Don’t tell me I shouldn’t do something because that guy over there can’t.[/quote]
If this is a referance to me, I didn’t tell you what to do. If you want to do jump squats go for it, my understanding of spinal compression makes me not want to do them.
[quote]Schmazz wrote:
I’m going to throw in my $.02 on the debate.
I’m an athlete at a D1 level who had never cleaned before. After coming here and cleaning for a while I noticed my 40yd dash time drop by more than 1/2 a second.
You tell me if they worked or not.[/quote]
This is not science. There are a million other variables that could have accounted for the difference besides the inclusion of cleans. Did you run the 40s in the same shoes, on the same surface, under the same conditions? Were you relatively fatigued before the old attempt and better rested under the new one? Were your strength levels on more basic lifts (e.g., squats and DLs) roughly the same before the different attempts? Were the the different attempts timed in the same manner? Did you have more practice at the actual event itself before the faster attempt than the slower one(s)? I could go on.
Of course, even if we assume that the inclusion of cleans did, in fact, improve your 40 time by .5 seconds, what’s to say that you would not have improved your 40 time by .55 or .6 seconds if you had spent your time doing more short sprints instead of cleans?
I’m not saying that the effect is impossible or even unlikely, just that the “I got faster after I started doing cleans” does not prove much.