Madcow 5x5 - Power Cleans - 3 Reps?

[Oliver Geddes]

Well, the title pretty much covers it. The impression I get is that cleans are primarily a power/explosiveness exercise, and high rep sets are (at least for me) quite difficult to maintain energy throughout, and once you get tired, it gets relatively difficult to do an explosive exercise like the power clean. That was a horrible sentence, grammatically. Sorry.

On SS, you ran 5 x 3, and that felt pretty good. on Madcow it's 5x5, and that's relatively a lot of cleaning volume. I've googled it, and seen a couple of people support changing it to 8 x 3, ramping and keeping the last three sets at the final weight.

Also, on a related note, I've seen in a couple of descriptions of madcow that you don't do the backoff set of 8 reps with power cleans, although you do with rows. Is there a reason for that? And is it something that people agree with, or am I just misinformed. On the original madcow site, it doesn't seem to mention it, but I've seen reinterpretations that do, so just curious.

Thanks a lot!

Take care,

Oli

 

[Eric Brown]

I am always a big fan of low-repetition sets on the quick lifts, including power cleans. Helps maintain good technique, reduce risk of injury and maintain explosiveness.

Other than for very light conditioning work, I rarely go over three reps. Conditioning is normally five.

 

[Pathogenic]

You can do it the same way you did it on SS. Madcow recommends that you do high pulls instead of deadlifts on Wednesdays, btw.

As for backoff sets, I've gone almost 9 weeks on it without doing them, so I don't think they're absolutely necessary. I asked the same question in the noob questions thread, and got some good advice: they're probably necessary, but, if you decide to not do them and you start stalling, add them in and see if it makes a difference. I wouldn't do them for cleans, though.