Single exercise workout

JimmNeutron

For months now i have been hearing loads about this magic exercise called the clean and jerk or clean and snatch, whatever you like to call it. But anyway i have also been seeing a large amount of clean and jerk workouts which are just a few sets of this exercise.
I know it is a huge compuound lift that works almost every muscle in the body but would this workout plan work, even just for maintaining a bit of muscle mass and keeping fairly fit. I was thinking of doing this maybe 3 times a week while keeping up a cardio plan aswel due to the fact that it would save a s**t-lot of time. What does everyone think???

Boru.

It's an excellent exercise although I HIGHLY recomend you get proper instruction from an experienced lifter. A good clean and snatch requires a great deal of subtle body movement to ensure perfect form though the kinetic chain. Srew it up and you can do significant long term damage to your whole body, but in particular your spine and rotator cuff.

As regrads just doing that - I disagree. You'll certainly develop and become stronger in the plane of movement the the clean and snatch requires BUT you will significantly lose strength in many other aspects of your body. You will also lose range of motion unless you are following a strict stretching regieme and you will be promoting a great deal of muscular imbalance, which can lead to other problems

The BARE minimium I recomend is the big 3 - Bench, Dead Lift and Squat. If you have absolutely no time, continous, INTENSE training of just those three movements will produce incredible results in terms of strength and appearance.

If you can't lift - knock out 250 pushups, (Atlas, Dive Bomber, Hindu), 500 Squats (Hindu, Dands) and a 5 minute nose / chin to ground back bridge. No breaks, no rest.

You can complete both of those workouts within 15 minutes. It's extremely intense non stop work. You'll feel it in every part of your body, you'll be built and strong from nearly every angle, and you'll increase your aerobic fitness.

That said its still not a complete or fully developed program - it's the bare mimimum, you can get away with.

JimmNeutron

Thanks a mil boru, that bodyweight workout is pretty intense alrite. Would be very handy for days i cant get to the gym for whatever reason.

because_I_can

the snatch is one lift, clean and jerk is another. they are both lifts where the bar is raised from ground to overhead. the snatch is done in 1 phase straight from the ground to overhead, in c&j the bar is first raised to the shoulders, then jerked overhead.

most olympic lifters only do squat as their assistance work as per the bulgarian model. some lifters do lots of assistance work as per the russian system.

you can get extremely strong and explosive doing just the ols and squat.

there's lots of reasons for and against learnin the ols. the main one in my mind is actually the catch in the clean. nothing else. everything else can be replicated. catching a weight is learning to absorb force. this is almost as important as being able to output force.

if you can learn ols and do them safely they are an excellent exercise. if not then there are other things you can do as boru said. but you wont have that plyometric action.

bodyweight exercises are necessary but wont make you strong relatively

if you told us what you do or your goals it would be easier to advise you