350 – Clean & Jerk

They told me to explode up through the bar, so… Boom.

I got to start working on a new movement at CrossFit today. And not just any movement, but the king-daddy of all lifting movements, the Clean & Jerk. It’s the burliest thing you can do in the weight room, moving big weight from the floor, to over your head, with all the explosive grace of a ballerina shot out of a cannon. It is the movement you think of when you think of an Olympic weightlifter, and I’ve wanted to learn it for years.

The clean and jerk is not something you teach yourself. There are so many elements to doing it right, and such dire consequences for doing it wrong, that I would advise anyone wanting to learn it to seek out professional coaching. If you dork up a deadlift, you might throw out your back. If you mess up on a heavy clean and jerk, you might just kill yourself.

Now, that last bit won’t be a worry for me for quite a while. I have a long way to go before I’m putting up enough weight to be truly dangerous, but that’s fine. For now, I’m working on the push-jerk, rather than the more dramatic (and arguably more effective) split jerk, until I master the elements of the more basic form. I have a long way to go until it starts to look and feel right, and I have to have that before I can start adding much weight, but I’m excited to finally be learning it!