The One Thing I See Most High School Athletes Get Wrong With the Clean

If I had to pick one mistake I see more than any other when coaching the clean, it's this:

Athletes try to lift the bar with their arms instead of driving it with their legs.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard an athlete say, "I just can't clean any more weight."

Most of the time, it isn't because they aren't strong enough. It's because they're trying to muscle the bar with their arms instead of creating power from their legs.

The clean can be thought of as a jumping movement.

Your legs are the engine. Your arms are mostly passive cables that hold onto the bar.

Unfortunately, many athletes do the exact opposite. As soon as the bar passes their knees, they start bending their elbows and trying to curl the weight upward. It feels like they're working harder, but they're actually making the lift much more difficult.

So how do we fix it?

One of my favorite exercises is the jump shrug.

The goal is simple: teach the athlete to create as much force as possible with their legs before the arms ever become involved.

We usually start from the power position, where athletes can focus on driving hard through the floor and finishing with a tall, explosive extension. This also allows them to practice the position where the bar contacts their mid thigh.

Once they understand that feeling, we'll progress to jump shrugs from the mid-hang, where they learn to stay balanced and maintain good positions as the bar travels from above the knee into the power position.

Another drill I use all the time is what I call the bump drill. One of the biggest challenges for newer lifters is learning to correctly time the powerful extension of the legs with the contact of the bar. Many athletes either bang the bar into their thighs too early or completely miss the contact point altogether.

The bump drill teaches athletes to feel the bar brush the mid-thigh at the exact same moment they aggressively extend their hips, knees, and ankles. When those two things happen together, the bar suddenly feels light and floats upward with far less effort.

Once athletes understand those positions and that timing, we pair these drills directly with cleans.

A typical sequence might look like this:

2 Jump Shrugs from power position

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2 Cleans from power position

Repeating that complex allows athletes to immediately apply what they just felt in the drill to the full movement. In many cases, the difference is almost instant. The bar moves faster, the lift looks smoother, and athletes often hit weights that felt impossible just a few minutes earlier.

The biggest takeaway? If your clean feels like an upper-body exercise, you're probably doing too much with your arms.

Learn to push the ground away. Let your legs do the work they were designed to do, and you'll be surprised how much easier—and stronger—your clean becomes.

At STS, we don't just tell athletes to "use your legs." We use drills that teach them exactly what that feels like so they can build great technique that lasts for years.