Which clean should you actually be doing?

So should you be performing power cleans or hang cleans in your workouts? Maybe both?

You've probably seen some form of this exercise performed, or you're already using it in your program.

You might think the two are interchangeable, or even that the hang version is only a regression of the power clean, something you use until an athlete has the technical ability and the strength to perform it from the floor.

Two words get attached to cleans, and both mean something specific, though you wouldn't know it from how they're thrown around.

Power tells you where you catch the bar. Hang tells you where the bar starts. They're independent of each other, which is why you can have all four combinations.

A clean starts with the bar on the floor and finishes with it racked across your shoulders, caught in a full squat, and you stand up out of the bottom. That's the competition lift.

A power clean is the same pull, caught above parallel. You dip to receive the bar but you don't ride it down.

A hang clean starts with you stood upright holding the bar somewhere between your knees and the top of your thighs. There's no pull off the floor. It can be caught deep or caught high, and a hang power clean is the high-catch version.

A clean pull is the pull and the extension with nothing on the end of it. The bar goes up, you stay standing, and it comes back down.

Where you hold the bar in a hang changes it too. Above the knee is the shortest version and the one most people mean.

At the knee gives you a bit more distance to accelerate through. Below the knee is nearly a full pull without being one.

The pull off the floor is a longer run at the bar.

More time accelerating it means it's travelling quicker by the time you extend, and you hold a flat back under a heavy load for a couple of seconds on the way. That's genuine strength work on its own.

Take that away and what's left is the extension.

Hips driving through, chest up, heels off the floor, bar making contact around the top of the thigh. That's the part a sprinter is there for.

It's a vertical jump with a barbell in your hands, and nothing else in the movement resembles anything you do on a track.

Catching high rather than in a squat keeps it a sprint exercise. Full cleans need a lot more ankle and hip range and a lot more coaching, and getting good at squatting under a heavy bar isn't your event.

Clean pulls keep the extension and the loading and drop the catch entirely, which takes the technical risk and the wrist demand out with it.

Two things mostly decide which of these an athlete can use, and both are about positions they can physically get into.

Ankles decide whether the floor is available. Setting up for a clean puts the shins further forward than a deadlift does, because the bar has to stay tight to the legs and the hips sit lower.

That costs ankle range, and sprinters aren't famous for having much of it. Watch one of yours set up and something gives.

Either the heels come off the floor so the shins can travel, or the heels stay down and the hips ride up and the back rounds. Long shins make it worse. Start the bar at thigh height and none of it comes up.

Wrists and shoulders decide whether catching is available at all. To rack a clean the elbows have to come through fast and the upper arms have to finish roughly level, so the bar sits on the shoulders rather than the hands.

If an athlete can't get there, they'll dump the bar or take it on the chest, and that's true from the hang exactly as much as from the floor. Clean pulls are the answer, not more practice.

Training age decides the rest.

A clean isn't a lift anyone picks up off a video, and it needs teaching by somebody who knows it. If nobody around can, use pulls and jumps and don't apologise for it.

A well-loaded clean pull will do more for a sprinter than a badly executed clean, and it'll do it without anybody getting hurt.

There's one mistake worth naming because it only exists from the floor, and it's the common way people injure themselves cleaning.

The bar should leave the ground slowly and build speed.

Rip it from the first inch and the arms pull before the legs have finished, the hips shoot up, the chest drops, and the lower back takes what the legs should have. Starting at the thigh, there's nothing to rip.

So how do you know when someone's ready to move from the hang to the floor?

Compare their numbers rather than watching their setup.

An athlete should clean more from the floor than from the hang. Longer pull, faster bar, bigger lift. If yours does the opposite, something in that first pull is wrong, and weightlifting coaches tend to point at the same handful of causes.

Shoulders too far forward and hips too high at the start. Snatching the bar off the ground and tipping out over it.

Genuinely weak off the floor and fine once it's moving. So much hang work that they cut the floor pull short out of habit. Or not fancying the drop under it from down there, so never finishing the lift.

That test comes from weightlifting rather than from anything measured on sprinters, so use it to go and look rather than to settle it. It costs you one session, and none of those causes improve by adding weight.

For most sprinters, most of the time, a hang power clean from above the knee is the version that earns its place. Three to five reps, loaded so the bar still moves fast, and end the set when the speed drops rather than when the reps run out.

The floor is worth having once an athlete has the ankles for the setup, the years behind them, and somebody watching who knows the lift.

Elite sprint programs run it at doubles and singles working up heavy, which tells you it's being used as strength work rather than as something to learn on.

And if the catch is the problem rather than the pull, use clean pulls and stop worrying about it.

Nobody ever got slower because they skipped the part where a barbell lands on their collarbones.