You have powerful, aggressive hip extension in the snatch and clean, but your Olympic lifts are still a disaster with lots of misses, and your best snatch and clean weights are way lower than they should be for your strength. I’m going to show you the most common reason for this, and how to fix it.
 
I’m going to talk mostly about the snatch here because this problem affects it more, but all of this applies to the clean fundamentally—I’ll cover some details specific to the clean toward the end of the article.
 
First, let’s cover what SHOULD be happening:
 
In the second pull, we’re using leg drive and hip extension together to accelerate the bar upward as much as possible.
 
The key is the way this motion is coordinated—it’s not simply simultaneous hip and knee extension, which creates more forward force like a kettlebell swing.
 
Powerful vertical leg drive is what makes your hip extension produce the result you need—upward bar acceleration.
 
With proper leg drive through the second pull, the hips move forward over the feet as the knees scoop under the bar, and then they continue moving UP over the feet as they finish extending.
 
If the hips are NOT moving up as they finish extending, that extension is putting excessive horizontal force on the bar and moving your balance forward, and you’re losing the upward acceleration necessary to make lifts with big weights.
 
 
A Simple Model
 
A simple way to think about the pull is that leg drive controls the direction and elevation of the bar, and hip extension generates speed. Of course this is an oversimplification, but it’s a simple model to help you understand how the combination of legs and hips works most effectively.
 
Without continued vertical leg drive, hip extension loses effectiveness for two simple reasons:
 
First, if the hips are still extending without the legs pushing into the floor, they’ll drive too far forward, pushing you and the bar forward. That means not just less upward acceleration, but also the bar moving away from your body, which disrupts balance and stability overall, and slows or even stops your pull under the bar.
 
Second, hip extension without leg drive is like trying to jump off a soft surface—a lot of that force just gets absorbed by your soft legs instead of actually accelerating the bar upward. Vertically-driving legs create a solid platform for the hips to produce upward force so all of that effort is transmitted to the bar instead of being lost in unwanted movement.
 
 
Balance & Stability
 
That leg drive also preserves your balance as you extend. First, it keeps your hips and therefore center of mass over your feet where they need to be; and second, it directs the bar upward instead of forward, which keeps that mass above your feet rather than in front of them.
 
And all that means you’re able to pull under the bar with maximal speed and bar proximity, execute a quicker and easier turnover, and naturally move into a solid receiving position for a strong, stable lift.
 
And on top of that, adequate leg drive power in the finish of the pull is what allows you to separate and move your feet into a solid receiving stance—that means not just the best squat position to stabilize the bar, but it also means that if for any reason your balance is off, your feet can move with your body forward or backward so that when you receive the bar, your base stays under the weight and you can easily re-establish balance.
 
With weak or short leg drive, your feet will tend to stay stuck to the floor—so if you and the bar are not perfectly balanced, that means receiving in position that isn’t balanced over your feet, which means instability and pressouts at best, and complete misses at worst.
 
So that leg drive is responsible for multiple elements that produce reliably successful lifts, and not having adequate drive can cause a long list of technical problems that lead to instability, pressouts and misses, which are often misdiagnosed, meaning corrections don’t work.
 
 
Is It Slower?
 
Easily the most common reaction I see from athletes when this topic comes up is that pushing with the legs makes them slower. The good news is that’s complete nonsense, and I’ll explain exactly why.
 
First, anything new is going to be somewhat slower initially because you’ll be consciously trying to control the movement, which is inherently slower than any movement that’s well-established as a motor skill.
 
It may also take a bit of time to develop better leg drive power through training in the same way your hip power wasn’t instantly as good as it is now before you started training.
 
And your timing will need to be refined with practice as you learn where the true finish of your extension actually is and become better at stopping and changing directions aggressively.
 
But ultimately, complete leg drive does not make the lift slower in any meaningful way.
 
The reason it may FEEL slower initially aside from the learning and training aspects I just mentioned is that you’re comparing a complete movement to an incomplete one—you’re now moving your body a longer distance, so even with identical speed, that takes more time.
 
But less time is meaningless if the movement isn’t effective—no one cares how fast your misses are.
 
This is like saying your 90m sprint is faster than your 100m sprint… it’s not faster, it’s shorter, so it takes less time. And most importantly, if you’re only going 90m, you’re not finishing the race and it doesn’t matter how fast you were.
 
So again, this motion still has to be executed with maximal power and therefore maximal speed, and there needs to be no hesitation at the top of the extension before moving down under the bar.
 
Train to be more powerful, practice to improve your timing, and be maximally aggressive through the lift—and apply those things to the complete movement.
 
 
The Clean
 
All of this applies fundamentally to the clean, but I want to point out a few related aspects unique to the clean.
 
First, many athletes don’t need to truly extend in the clean—the bar and body need to travel about half the distance they do in the snatch, meaning the bar doesn’t need to be accelerated quite as much, and there’s a significantly larger margin of error.
 
Many lifters can achieve adequate bar acceleration for even their heaviest cleans with partial extension, and in this case, extending further is neither necessary nor beneficial. This is typically the case for athletes with a higher pulling strength to squat strength ratio.
 
However, for athletes who are stronger squatters than pullers, or those who are stronger than they are explosive, the clean extension more likely needs to be complete like in the snatch to accelerate and elevate the bar adequately.
 
The complication of this final extension in the clean is related to the grip width—the narrower grip of the clean means the bar will contact lower on the body than in the snatch, in which the bar conveniently meets the body right at the crease of the hips (incidentally, this is why early arm bend is more prevalent in cleans, and why athletes with shorter arms and longer torsos are more easily able to extend well in their cleans).
 
The key to being able to extend completely in the clean is properly navigating that bar-body interaction in the power position. This means getting the highest contact you’re able to through a wide enough grip and staying over the bar long enough, but also being more active in guiding the bar close to your body after that contact.
 
If you let the bar bounce off your upper thighs after its initial contact, that gap between it and your body will prevent you from driving with the legs well and extending completely.
 
So focus on using lat tension to keep the bar moving as close to your legs as possible after it initially contacts, and finishing the leg drive after that contact to continue moving the bar up your body instead of away from it.
 
 
 
Fixing the Problem
 
So how do you fix this problem in your lifts?
 
First, keep this simple idea in mind: as long as you’re extending the hips, keep pushing straight down into the floor with your legs just as powerfully.
 
Then we can use certain exercises and combinations to practice and train a better movement.
 
Doing pulls from power position is the simplest way to initially feel balanced, vertical leg drive through the top of the pull. Make sure you’re evenly balanced on the foot with your trunk vertical and the bar in contact with your body, then focus on pushing straight down into the floor as powerfully as possible and guiding the bar up against yourself as you extend. Pausing in the extended position can help you dial in your balance and position.  
 
Snatches and cleans from power position are the simplest and usually best way to feel and train this final extension with correct leg drive during an actual competition lift. Make sure you set that perfect starting position like in the pulls, and start the lift with leg drive instead of hip extension.
 
Once these feel reliably good, start gradually working to lower hang positions and then eventually to the full lift. A good idea is doing a complex starting with 1-2 reps from power position, and then adding 1-2 reps from whatever hang position you’re currently working from so you can practice and feel the best possible finish, and then try to replicate it in the hang reps.
 
Finally, use a pull or pull to hold + snatch or clean complex with the same focus on balanced, complete leg drive through the top. Keeping the pull from the floor to just past the knees a bit slower initially can help you maintain better control and execute a better drive through the finish.