I'm looking to work on explosiveness, are powercleans the best for this?

mkirklions

Playing rec football, trying to get faster.

I already run a mile a day and do weight lifting. I'm pretty fast on the field, but I never did much sprinting as a kid.

I was suggested to do powercleans to work on this, any suggestions?

cwolfman13

I was a sprinter from 2nd grade through my senior year in high school. When I was in high school, Olympic lifting was something we did for sure to improve our explosiveness...along with a bunch of other plyo stuff. It's also just fun.

sgt1372

Mark Rippetoe includes power cleans in his Starting Strength program, as did Bill Starr did in his 5x5 program, both of which have been used in training football athletes.

As Mark says in his book, Starting Strength:

"The power clean is used in sports conditioning because it trains explosion and, done correctly, it is the best exercise for converting the strength obtained in other exercises to power.

. . .

Since the nature of the vast majority of sports is explosive, involving the athelete's ability to accelerate his body or an object, the ability to accelerate is pivotal in sports performance. The power clean is our most important tool in this way against inertial."

See, Starting Strength, 3rd Ed (2011), pgs 177-220 for a complete discussion of the power clean and how to do it properly.

Mark also mentions plyo jump training as a way to train explosiveness but prefers the power clean because it builds strength in addition to explosiveness.

SonyaCele

when we train for explosiveness, we add things like resistance bands to our exercises and weights. You can add bands to just about any weighted lift, the barbell or dumbells or bodyweight, and do the lift fast, push though the resistance. your body will have to learn you have to explode the lift to finish it out.

Cherimoose

The short answer - practice sprinting & agility drills. There's lots of them Youtube. You can do them every 2-3 days if you don't get too crazy. Nothing will make you quick on the field like training quickness on a field.

Long-winded answer - Speed in sports is dependent on coordination & skill, which have a limited carryover benefit from one movement to a different one. This is known as the Specificity Principle in exercise science circles. So i disagree with Rippetoe that power cleans are the best exercise for quickness in all sports - or any sport for that matter. I'd actually caution against adding power cleans if you're doing strength training plus sprinting drills plus your daily runs, because training too many things can lead to burnout or injuries.

rybo

As a collegiate sprinter/jumper, cleans were an integral part of our workouts.
Cleans, short sprints, prowler pushes, plyometrics are all good for building explosive power.
As these are pretty taxing on the cns, more isn't always better.