Name: Clean Grip Width - What Hand Placement Works Best
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T11:37:12.000Z
Duration: 2 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The width of your grip can make or break your cleans.

At the very least, it can make them a lot easier or cause you unnecessary trouble.

As a starting point, I recommend a grip between half a fist and a fist width outside the shoulders.

This is wide enough to support strong posture and bracing, but

not so wide that it's likely to create insecurity in the rack position.

From here, you need to experiment with widths until you find what works best for your proportions and mobility.

Be sure you test those grips with heavier weights, which will highlight problems not always noticeable with light weights.

The benefits to a wider grip are a higher contact point, quicker turnover, less distance to lift, get under the bar, the bar naturally staying closer, and

The drawbacks are that the first pull may feel a bit harder and the rack position may be less secure.

The benefits to a narrower grip are a potentially easier first pull and more secure rack position.

The drawbacks are a longer distance to lift get under the bar, a lower contact point, a slower turnover, and

more difficulty keeping the bar close and maintaining solid squat posture.

In other words, a wider grip is more likely to work better, but you won't know without trying.

The grip widths possible for you will be dictated by your proportions and mobility, even with effort over time to improve your mobility, there's no guarantee you'll ever be able to replicate your favorite lifter's grip or rack position or even get to what you believe would be truly optimal for yourself.

You may never be able to have anything more than your fingers under the bar in the rack position.

Remember that in spite of what inexperienced social media personalities or clickbaiters will tell you, a the ability to have a full, clean rack grip is dependent ultimately on proportions, not mobility, and

b you do not at all need a full grip in the rack to be successful.

So again, experiment to find what works best for you, not what someone else does or has told you is the one true way.