It’s good to select heavy free-weight exercises that employ a lot of musculature, but you also want to use fluid and controlled movements during high-intensity splits that break the body down into numerous muscle groups over several different workouts. You want to have a specific muscle group to recruit, with a contraction that aims for 100 percent intensity. Since power cleans consist of two pulls worked in an explosive setting, it’s harder to really concentrate the effort into any one region. Dead lifts are part of the above program, but they are performed using a rack to elevate the starting position off of the floor to maximize the portion of the lift that involves a serious squeeze of the back musculature.

Stick to heavy, compound free-weight lifts that allow you to maximize a strong contraction while minimizing momentum. This is why I suggest this only for the advanced bodybuilder, these types of contractions take time for a bodybuilder to develop the motor control, or mind-muscle connection, to really squeeze and subsequently perform at a true 100 percent intensity.