LSU Tigers Coach Tom Morfitt: The Hang Clean Exercise

Tom Morfitt, the head strength and conditioning coach for Louisiana State University (LSU) Tigers football team, teaches the Hang Clean. ""The most important aspect of Hang Cleans is how we lift it off the floor. And I don’t know if you noticed today, but we have our guys when we’re doing Hang Cleans we’re gonna do a clean pool to get in the power position. So that’s the first coaching point, is how we lift it off the floor. We do not want our football players bending over and picking their way up like that, you know, near limit weight. That makes no sense at all. All right, the key and then once we get the ball here to the power position if we’re doing Hang Cleans from above the knee, okay, in the power position, then I should be in this position here with my wrist curl, the bar at the top third of my thigh, but it will both rotate it out to the side and my shoulders over the ball. From this position now, there is some pre-stretch, the guys can rock a little bit, then go down. And from this position here they’re going to jump shrug in pool and generate that force to get the bar to travel in the air. I mean they simply drop underneath it and meet their elbows up. And I don’t have great flexibility here in my wrist and triceps either, but this is another very important position here coz too many guys, they rock the bar with their elbows down and they rock it on their chest. You can’t lift heavy weights like that. You’ll miss a lot of your heavy power cleans and stuff if you’re not properly rocking that bar here in the throat, this whole top of the clavicle, between the Adam’s apple and the clavicles where that bar’s supposed to go. But flexibility in your own--my triceps and depending on my arm length, there’s a couple of factors that determine how high that bar goes. But that’s what we’re looking for. We want to make sure that when we explode, we generate enough speed to get the ball to go up so that we can quickly drop on anything. Then you take, you know, best time acceleration, gives us our power. That’s why it’s so important that the bar goes fast also coz we’re generating watts.""