Clean and Jerk This!

Aggression

Lately I have been a little bit torn between my love for the Olympic lifts and the power lifts. I did a piece on the squat a little while ago. Many accomplished power lifters call the squat "The king of all lifts". It is true that developing strength and proficiency in the squat translates to all other lifts, however, it is with good reason that the man with the strongest clean and jerk in the world is considered to be the worlds strongest man.

I believe that it can be argued that the clean and jerk is the one exercise that you can build an entire routine around that will effectively train your entire body. You can walk into a gym, do a max effort session of the clean and jerk and walk out knowing that you just did a very effective full body work out. If you feel you need to spend more time in the gym then you can break it down to it's fundamentals. I dare you to go into the gym and do 5x5 of power clean, front squat and press and try to tell my you haven't had enough for one day.

The clean and jerk is called the worlds most powerful lift for a reason. Anybody can take a small amount of weight and move it from the floor to overhead, but I challenge you to spend some real time learning the intricacies of this complicated lift and see how much stronger, more explosive and more athletic you become.

WOD Thursday 03 October 2011

Press
1/1/1/1/1

Pull up
3/3/3/3/3

Plank
3 x one minute