10 Tips To Improve Your Kettlebell Clean

Kettlebell training has firmly set itself on the map in the UK over the last 12 years.
Many people enjoy the training benefits they offer from weight loss, cardiovascular efficiency, strength, explosive power and for dynamic correspondence to many different sports. The primary objective with any new form of exercise should always be mechanical proficiency – start light, get it right, and repeat it again and again until you can do it properly.

Kettlebell training is not difficult; it is just different when compared to traditional resistance and cardio approaches. How many times have you seen people doing swings, cleans, jerks, snatches windmills and get ups in your local gym or leisure centre? All that this means is that professional education is the bridge between knowing nothing about buy quality kettlebells to being proficient in them and being able to reap the rewards they offer for constant and applied effort.

As one of the most technical exercises covered on our workshops we will take the clean under the microscope and break it down so that it can be enjoyed rather than feared…..

The kettlebell clean is a very technical exercise that many people find challenging.
These tips are aimed at improving the exercise and minimising the most common problems with the movement pattern and forearm impact. Exercises like the swing and press follow a fixed and predictable movement path that requires little action from the person exercising.

However, the clean, snatch and jerk are all exercises where the lifter is required to intervene at exactly the right moment in order to interrupt the movement path and change the trajectory of the weight. All of them require explosive power and all of them are filed under technical on our courses and workshops for that very reason.

The clean is an excellent exercises for teaching people the basics of force production – how to use Newton's third law in order to drive forcefully into the floor in order to get an equal and opposite reactive force.

Think of it as a vertical jump. Stand yourself up nice and tall and then jump as high as you can. The first thing you will do is bend your legs in order to prepare the body for the jump. Therefore the nervous system instinctively knows what is required for the body to be successful in this task.
Now try the same task by squatting down slowly, over a few seconds. You have just confirmed that explosive power does not come from slow and controlled movements – think of a tennis serve. Now try again by squatting until your hips are parallel with your knees. The effort required to stand from this position into an explosive jump has now greatly multiplied in difficulty and is no longer effective.

If you view the floor as being a trampoline you will get an idea of what is supposed to happen. There will be a short and sharp bend of the legs by just a few inches and then an explosive jump aided by an arm swing. The great thing about the kettlebell clean is that it condenses all of the above into one simple action. If you do not produce enough force, the kettlebell will not finish in the right position. If you produce too much force, the kettlebell will lift far too high and forcefully strike the forearm with the assistance of gravity.

As such, it is the perfect exercise for teaching people effective force production through the floor and a