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« on: June 16, 2011, 06:17:45 pm »
The ratio of squat to clean and squat to snatch is going to only ring true with the FULL lifts, and not nearly as accurate or predictable with the POWER versions of the lifts. Ive seen several occasions where, the best, most explosive athletes, will actually power clean MORE than they full squat. There is no beating the system on the power versions of the lifts, especially when caught at quarter squat depth or higher, the weight has to be JUMPED up, several feet in the air. With the full lifts, this is not nearly as true, as technique improvements enable one to get under a bar pulled very low in the air, and then the squat ratio will be much more true as you have to actually SQUAT the weight back up to a standing position, and the squat becomes the limiting factor, not overall power production in the movment.
With longer lever lengths, similar to longer legs on squats, you will actually see even more improvements on the field/court/track, with improvements in those lifts, than athletes with shorter limbs that are more "lifter" friendly. A 30 inch femur will be able to do much more with a 300lb squat than a 10 inch femur and a 400lb squat when it comes to power and speed production. When you have to jump the bar a mile high on a power snatch to make it, regardless of whether or not the load is equal to some number derived from a group of similarly structured individuals in a lift requiring similar heights of vertical displacement, you are producing a shit load more POWER to make that lift.
Note that I am in no way saying you HAVE to do any olympic lifts to improve your jumping at all, they are merely a valuable tool in the tool box, but the POWER versions, especially when performed from the hang, are going to carryover very well to vertical jumping for most athletes. The big problem with hang cleans is athletes performing a hang "swing", in which they dont vertically accelerate jack shit, they bump the bar out with the hips just long enough to swing it out and around and duck the shoulders underneath. Said lifter will often rock back and forth, contract the traps PRIOR to the pull, and swing the bar up, with very little true vertical velocity on the bar. Most of the time, people who hang clean a lot more than they power clean fit this bill, and they wont see the performance transfer they are looking for. Its much harder to do this with the power snatch, due to the distance the bar has to travel overhead, but it can happen on occasion.
So yea, I wouldnt worry about any charts that say you should clean or snatch xxx lbs if you squat xxxlbs, look at the power versions as an exercise to improve POWER, and the squat as an exercise to improve absolute strength. If you are constantly improving your power clean and power snatch, regardless of the ratio to your squat, and its in good technique, you will likely see improvements in your jumping. If you dont, then simply do something else besides olympic variants or olympic lifts.
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