Weight training exercises, barbell curls pointless for a trackie?

why would a shrug one of the technically easiest gym exercises need someone to be proficient at cleans and dead lift two of the technically harder exercises? As for being a "half way exercise" what a load of tish.

Only just noticed this.

A shrug, which could be more descriptively labelled as an "explosive clean or snatch grip pull from the floor" is technique wise much more challenging than a deadlift or a clean. In fact even competent lifters are wise to do actually racked cleans as warm ups to their shrugs to make their bodies extend properly and force the maximal power output/co-ordinated muscle contraction that HAVING to rack the bar forces.

For an athlete in season, deadlifts are tough to recover from and can leave the athlete well below an acceptable level of performance. You need to do deadlifts fairly often to "maintain the groove", busting heavy deadlifts all of a sudden once every 2-3 weeks is a good way to either make no progress or get injured. But doing them more frequently can overwhelm recovery capacity. So what to do?

You can just do no pulling from the floor at all. You can also rely on squats for strength and cleans for power. Or you can do squats, cleans (or snatches) and explosive pulls which are intentionally too heavy to rack. Which are labelled as shrugs or high pulls depending on how high you can get the bar.

You can vary the intensity of what you pull by how high you pull it. Shrugs can help cleans and cleans can help shrugs.

Most olympic weightlifters never ever deadlift, but they will do clean/snatch grip shrugs or high pulls to overload the back in a similar way to a deadlift and for a heavier variation of explosive pull/extension exercise. They would not do conventional deadlifts because it would cause their performance to drop for long enough to disrupt their other training considerably.