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  Something that helps a lot of guys is to tighten the upper back as well as concentrating on arching hard.  Basically flex the lats like youre doing a pull up, and hold that position.  The lower part of the spine can sometimes be the issue as well, and thinking about "turning your belt buckle to the floor" will help lock in the lower lumbar region. 

  Make sure you sit back a little before you begin the pull, kind of "rock back" onto the back half of the foot at first, that will help with your start as well.  When you jump a barbell up think about jumping off the heels instead of the toes.  When you jump your body into the air you want to jump off the toes, when youre jumping a bar up you want to jump off the heels.   Youll still get plenty of plantar flexion when you do this, but using that cue will keep you better centered as well as help you extend with the glutes more and not the low back. 

 

  Youve got several issues there that are causing you problems, and some that will for sure cause you problems as you get stronger.

   First, your starting position is off, youre back is rounded to begin with, and its only going to get worse from there if its already rounding at the start. 

  You also dont have a first and second pull, youre basically jerking the weight off the ground in one motion and racking it.  When you start from the floor, the first pull is controlled, and the goal is to keep a constant torso angle to set up the second pull (the explosive part of the lifts).  Think "push the floor away" until the bar passes the knee, then "jump".

   Then, youre getting on your toes and its kicking you forward, and as you catch youre not unlocking the hips, youre trying to lean back to compensate.  Its impossible to catch solid because you are off balance, you have to unlock the hips, even in the quarter squat position, dont lean back.

    You can fix these issues pretty easily if youll take a little weight off and start from the top down.  Hang power clean from the mid thigh, then hang power clean from slightly below knee, then finally power clean from the floor.  Something else that will help you is to do a front squat after clean you do.  Try to go right into it and not break the momentum, if you can catch in a full clean do so.  That will force you to unlock the hips and fix your catch. 

  I would also not do the high rep sets, thats likely re enforcing bad habits as you fatigue and form deteriorates more and more.  These lifts are like jumps, dont string together a bunch of sub max crappy ones, do one, re set, do another, etc.  You can easily get the same volume by doing a rep, taking about 10-20 seconds to reset, do another, etc.  You will maintain more explosiveness this way along with better technique. 

  You need to eat plenty of good foods right now, not try and diet down if thats what youre getting at.  Just clean up your eating habits, eat clean, and get stronger.  You can get as lean as you want but until you build some more muscle and strength youre not going to be very fast regardless.  Starting track in itself will increase your caloric expenditure a lot, couple that with cleaning up your diet and eating foods that are beneficial to you as an athlete and cutting out the ones that arent, you will get leaner very quickly.

 cool man, good luck with it.  One more thing you need to think about is getting some help with your sprint starts/form.  That will knock a good amount of time off very quickly and will give you a set group of mechanics to focus on, so youre not running a different race each time you sprint.

I think I'm going to do 3x10 for a while, just to break out of the groove. Will get back to 4-6 rep sets in the near future but for a while I'll go with 10 rep sets.

I'm not sure about gaining weight though... I worked pretty hard to lose weight and get lighter and suffer less from landings and jumps, and also benefit from more speed in my one leg jumps. I'm very close to being too heavy for one-leg jumping in my opinion, at ~85 kg I'm really heavy for one-leg jumping, I'm at 79.7 kg now.

So they kind of beat each other up, my goals, of gaining muscle and not getting heavy.

 It will be fine to change up your set/rep scheme for a while man but dont fall into that wheel of changing things just to do something different, make SURE there is a reason.  You can look anywhere you like and find that the people who make the most progress are the ones who stick with what they are doing the longest, and the ones who spin their wheels are the ones constantly changing their training focus/plans to the newest, hottest topic around. Just about anything will work as long as youre adding consistent weight to the bar, but you have to stick with a plan to do that.

  At the end of the year, if you arent lifting more weight on your main lifts that matter the most to your performance, your strength training failed.  Sometimes you have to waste a year to learn this, sometimes you can take someones word for it and avoid it, but in the end thats all that matters.  So pick something and stick to it until you have a good reason to change to something else.

  If youre eating clean and plenty of protein, adding consistent weight to the bar, and maintaining an active schedule jumping/running/playing ball etc., the weight you gain will almost always help your performance a lot.

 

So what you're essentially saying is that I could go on with 3x4-6 since that type of training is more specific to what my target is in terms of athletic goals but doing some assistance work like RDLs 2x8 or BSSs 2x8 would help in my wish for more hypertrophy as a additional stimuli.

yep

But is 2x8 "enough" of a stimuli for hypertrophy? Do these 2 sets really make any difference at all?

Of course they do, your muscles dont know whether youre doing a squat or a lunge or a tire flip, they only know TENSION. You can target the specific musculature you want to enhance with assistance exercises like the bss, all while saving the cns for your squatting and jumping a little more. We use the squat to train the movement and the movement pattern.  when hypertrophy is the goal, the musculature being trained in an efficient manner is all that matters, not specificity to sporting movement.

lol. something has to give man, you want to build muscle? Youre going to be a little heavier.  This is the thing though, a gain of 10lbs of lean tissue in the lower body is huge as far as improving performance, assuming you dont gain a lot of fat and or cut  in the process.

 Pick up 10lbs of steak and look how thick and dense it is, your leg size will definitely improve and so will performance if you take care to manage unwanted bodyfat gains.  You could easily build 10lbs of muscle mass, and lose 10 lbs of fat at your current state.  Thats a 20 lb change, but bodyweight will remain constant.  A 20 lb change for the better is HUGE for performance.

  Just be realistic about what rate you can build muscle at, dont overdo the eating, but dont underdo it either.  Keep adding weight to the bar consistently, eat a very high protein diet, and manage carbs/fats so that youre not gaining too much fat in the process.