Sumo

A detailed article on sumo deadlifting to be found here;

http://elitefts.com/documents/adv_sumo_deadlift_training.htm

How to Pull Less than 700 and 680…

Another deadlift post, this time from Dan Montague

How to Pull Less than 700 and 680…

The recent string of good DL posts have inspired me to jump on the band wagon and share the most successful training strategies I’ve found for training the deadlift.

I follow a traditional Westside-influenced split, I have experimenting with a Westside template training every other day, but have opted for the typical 4 workouts/week instead. A lot of my training decisions revolve around this schedule.

Speed Pulls

I believe in speed pulling, a lot. I think it’s the single most important factor in building my deadlift. However, I never got a lot out of it with straight weight or pulling against chains. A significant amount of band tension is what helped my speed pulls the most. Without platform doubled-mini bands add just over 100 pounds on the floor, and about 220-pounds at lockout (this will depend on lifter height, and whether or not the lifter is standing on blocks). It has taken me a while to find the sweet spot for how much weight to use on DE work. The majority of my speed pulls are done with 225 – 315 pounds on the bar, and bands.

Nearly all of my speed pulls are done off of a deficit. I stick to 2″ because anything higher than that doesn’t carry over well and always hurts my back. I used to live in a belt, but after reading posts by Billy Mimnaugh I realized that a lot more strength could be developed by training without a belt (Duh, I know). All of my speed pulls, regardless of weight or tension, are done without a belt.

I will do 6-10 singles, usually with the same weight, after speed squatting. Very rarely will I work up or add weight during a workout, I’ll use a wave instead, and add weight over a 3 week period and then repeat.

Max Effort

I believe Max Effort work is huge for the deadlift, especially when it comes to increasing a limit pull. Learning to strain, how to grind out weight and how to fight through sticking points without letting your body fall apart is vitally important to a deadlift. Unlike a lot of lifters, I do not subscribe to the idea that as long as the bar goes from point A to point B more weight can be added.

Even though numbers will suffer (if only for a short period of time) I don’t let my form go down the crapper during max effort work. I think this holds many people back. Learning to strain without buckling carries over to the deadlift better than buckling under weight. The best conventional pullers don’t fall apart under top weights. There’s a reason for this.

I believe in the goodmorning. I used to hate them, and can still hate them from time to time, but I believe they’re responsible for building a strong back and ass that carries over to the deadlift extremely well. I will use a belt on these, but only for my top sets. Working up to 80′ish% without a belt took some time to get used to, but has helped me feel more comfortable supporting weight.

I like the buffalo bar and giant cambered bar for bent-over/flat back goodmornings. I do these for 3RM’s.

I like the safety-squat bar for arched-back goodmornings. I do these for 3-5RM’s.

I like all three bars for suspended goodmornings. I do these from 38″ (never any higher) and for 1RM’s.

All goodmornings are done with a shoulder-width stance.

I like narrow-stance box squats for ME work, as well. I will use a box lower than my DE squat box, staying true to Westside, and will use the GCB, SSB and buffalo bar. I will use loose bottoms for these, however, because my hips can’t take raw work that well.

I get a lot out of block pulls, or pin pulls against a lot of band tension. I have pulled 455 with over 300 pounds of band tension from below the knee (albeit, right below the knee, like the bottom of the patella tendon). This was done without straps, and I attribute all of my grip strength to pulling against bands and loads of hex-holds, and block holds (we have a grip kit, made and welded by my other half).

I get a lot out of pulls with the plates 3-4″ off of the ground. I don’t like pulling weight at or above the knee, I find that it’s too easy to get in a better position than I would be from the floor, and that the carry-over is absolute crap to my full ROM pull. Below the knee for me!

Reverse band DL’s are great, and I will do them raw and suited. I hang (not choke) the bands from a pin that is 5′6″ from the floor, as prescribed in the Westside articles. It’s easy to find the right pin, because I stand 5′6″ from the floor. Like made me my perfect ruler for reverse band setups. I will use blue bands, sometimes green, but mostly blue.

Deficit pulls are used for DE days only, although I have done 2″ deficit pulls with chain for ME work. I should change my stance to say that I won’t do straight weight deficit pulls for ME work. I always get hurt.

I never do two heavy movements on ME day, either. I’ll do a main movement, and then move on to accessories.

Accessories

Rows, rows and a lot of rows. I will row 3-4 times a week. I like Chest-supported or DB rows for my upper body days, and T-bar rows for lower body days. I will throw in bent-over rows from time to time, and have been known to use the tarp bar for bent-over rows, too.

Shrugging is important. Heavy, full-body quivers with the straight bar, tarp bar and farmer’s handles (unless you have big enough DB’s). I’ve shrugged 230 in each hand with farmers, and 565 for a dirty 12 with a straight bar. My best tarp bar shrug is around 500 for 10 or so. I like the straight bar the most.

Heavy GHR situps are a must, for me. I like using a 25-kilo plate for sets of 6-8, held behind the head, lowered until my upper body is parallel to the floor. DB sidebends are the other movement I live on, working up to heavy sets of 5 with 150’s or so. I like Ab pulldowns with a strap, standing, but don’t think they are as affective as the heavy situps. I will do pulldown abs when I’m tired and puss-out (like after ME work).

I stick to the basics for hamstring and lower back work:

GHR’s – I love them inclined up about 20 inches, with bands or a bar on my back.

45-hypers – Medicine ball with bands, or a GCB on my back. I’ve done 135 for several sets of 6 with the giant cambered bar.

Reverse hypers are good for making my back feel better, but I save them for extra workouts or warm-ups. I don’t think they build up my lower back the way that heavy goodmornings or 45’s do.

Sled work is important for me, I feel that it adds in extra volume for my hamstrings and glutes, and walking backwards is a great way to build up the quads. I always use the sled on ME days, heavy. I will do several 180′ trips, forward and backward, with 3-5 plates (sometimes more for backward dragging).

My lower body workouts look like this:

Monday: Dynamic Effort Squat Deadlift

DE Squat

DE DL

GHR or 45

GHR situps

DB sidebends

Extra grip or facepulls
_______________________

Thursday: Max Effort Squat Deadlift

Main ME Movement

Lats

45 or GHR

GHR situps

Sled

Extra grip or facepulls

I’ve pulled 605 from the floor, and 475 against 220-pounds of band tension. This was done at a bodyweight of 230′ish. With my numbers recently, I’m guesstimating my pull to be about 630-640 at a bodyweight of 200′ish. I’ll have to pull for a max one day soon, we will know then. Obviously not as strong as Carnal or AlbertaBeef, but I’m moving up.

My Opinion on Pulling a Good Weight

More deadlifting. A post from AlbertaBeef;

My Opinion on Pulling a Good Weight

I just finished reading Carnal’s post on his methods on having a good pull. Back in February I pulled a pr of 680 at 230lbs bw. This was achieved by the following:

First off, pull often. There’s a lot of crap going around the ‘net saying that “the best way to deadlift is to not deadlift”. Sorry, for me this is bullshit, for others it may work but if you want to become a better skater are you going to do everything but? My point exactly. Pull often until your form is solid, not kind of good but rather 100%. Once your technique is perfected, then work on supplementary exercises that are going to contribute to you pulling a shitload.

Next, unlike Carnal, I believe speed kills. Meaning, I think it rules. More explosion, more weight moved, shifted, pulled, whatever. You should visualize from the very first plate that you put on that bar until the LAST plate, you will pull with equal speed. You have that mentality, you’ll see results.

Third, supplementary exercises, holy shit do you need to do a TON of hamstring work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting nothing but romanians but do seated hamstring curls or something along the like a couple times/week. Next, is core work, this includes your erectors, obliques and lats. Hit one of these areas at least once a training session. I personally enjoy doing tons of wide grip chins for high reps or heavy db rows when it comes to developing my lats. Upper back work, I’d get it done by doing some sort of row. Choice is yours but go HEAVY!!!

Fourth, I probably over 200× from the floor last year and I did rack pulls a total of 2×. My opinion was if I was going to pull hard from the floor, do all these bloody heavy supplementary movements, then how in the fuck is my body going to endure heavy racks as well? I knew I couldn’t do it and it worked out fine for me. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy and encourage racks but I’ll explain that later.

Leg work, along with a RELATIVELY strong back this is where all your power will come from. I actually did a lot of research in this particular area. If you are like me and specifically want to solely bring up your dead then you’ll need to front squat heavy, I mean the only set that should be over 3 reps should be your first set of 10 with 60 kg or 1 plate/side. Everything following that should be triples or doubles. You should be fucked after these. These will probably be the absolute best exercise to drive up your pulling numbers.

Sled work (leg press) – I shied away from back squatting and it paid off big time. The sled enabled me to position my feet high enough on the platform that I could activate my hamstrings and hips throughout the movement, which in turn mimicked my pull, this ultimately contributed in getting a bigger pull. 5-6 sets. Last set should be the heaviest, along with the highest reps. In other words, save your energy until your final set and go like a madman.

Grip, train your grip. When I pulled my last pr, my grip was the only thing that kind of fucked me, while I was locking out, I torn the callus off my right hand. If that wouldn’t have happened I probably would’ve been able to do more. Get that grip strong, heavy timed holds, spend lots of time alone or whatever but train that grip!!!!

Stuff I didn’t do:

Shrugs, my traps got more than enough work from all of my pulls, never needed to do them and funny enough, they never got sore. If I’d have done them it would’ve been a waste of time that I could’ve spent on something that would’ve helped my pull more.

Back Squats: I would’ve had to squat super heavy (IMO) for it to really help my pull and I would’ve had the same results from the front squats and sled, HOWEVER, the potential for a strain or injury while having all that weight on my back was a risk I didn’t want to take. When I have a deadlift routine that I follow, I become so focussed and determined to make it through with a pr. I don’t want to develop an injury that isn’t even from the lift that I want to increase (if that makes sense?).

Good mornings, no need. Just pull man, just pull.

As I said earlier I’d touch on rack pulls, I think they are beneficial and I will try them over the next few months during my next dead routine. I think it’s smart to hit racks from different heights, some weeks over the knees, some weeks under the knees. Go heavy. Again, keep the reps low.

Final words:

For me, I know I’d never achieve a bigger pull if I did high rep shit. Maybe once every six weeks throw in a high rep set of SOMETHING but sure as hell, no high rep pulls.

I pull once every 30-40 days while I’m not on my deadlift routine and once every 10 days for 10 weeks when I am going for a pr.

In the last year I’ve added nearly 100lbs on my deadlift and I’m a lifetime natural lifter. For me, I just finally found that keeping it very simple is what will pay off best.

Keep it simple and pull heavy. You’ll get there.

I’ll see you soon at 750… hopefully before 250 lbs bw.

Girls and Torn ACL’s…

A post by Benny One Six, to be found here;

________________________________

It’s long and filled with all kinds of stupid personality/biography stuff like they do for the olympics to get the women to watch… but the core is this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html

[...]If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

Anthony Beutler, a major in the U.S. Air Force and a professor at the School of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md., is among the cadre of doctors, scientists and researchers trying to crack the code of A.C.L. injuries. In 2001-2, he was a sports-medicine fellow at the Naval Academy, where he served as the physician for the women’s soccer team. Seven women were lost that season to A.C.L. ruptures. Beutler, already immersed in A.C.L. research, was still stunned. “I thought to myself, What in the heck is going on here?” he said. Last season, the women’s team at Navy suffered three torn A.C.L.’s. “They thought that was great, a fortunate year,” he told me. “Think about that. Just three. It’s bizarre.”

Men also tear their A.C.L.’s, most frequently in football and from direct blows to the leg. But even football players, according to N.C.A.A. statistics, do not rupture their A.C.L.’s during their fall seasons at the rates of women in soccer, basketball and gymnastics. The N.C.A.A.’s Injury Surveillance System tracks injuries suffered by athletes at its member schools, calculating the frequency of certain injuries by the number of occurrences per 1,000 “athletic exposures” — practices and games. The rate for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

If you are the parent of an athletic girl and live in a community that bustles with girls playing sports — especially the so-called jumping and cutting sports like soccer, basketball, volleyball and lacrosse — it may seem that every couple of weeks you see or hear about some unfortunate young woman hobbling off the field and into the operating room. The first time, you think: What a stroke of bad luck. But you figure it won’t happen to your daughter because, after all, what are the odds?

After a couple of more A.C.L. tears in the neighborhood, you get worried and think, Gosh, we must be in a really bad cluster for these injuries. Why here? But in all likelihood, what you are witnessing is not a freakish run of misfortune but the law of averages playing out.

The Injury Surveillance reports include commentary as well as data, and in 2007 the authors stated that an A.C.L. rupture is “a rare event” and advised against making too much of the tears sustained by male and female collegiate athletes across a range of sports. But a young woman playing college soccer can easily generate 200 exposures a year between her regular season in the fall, off-season training in the spring and club play in the summer. Plenty of younger players, girls in their early through late teens, will accrue well in excess of that number between their high-school seasons, their club seasons — which often run year-round — and multigame tournaments on weekends and soccer camps in the summer. (The same is true in other sports in which girls play school and club seasons, including basketball, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey.)

So imagine a hypothetical high-school soccer team of 20 girls, a fairly typical roster size, and multiply it by the conservative estimate of 200 exposures a season. The result is 4,000 exposures. In a cohort of 20 soccer-playing girls, the statistics predict that 1 each year will experience an A.C.L. injury and go through reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and the loss of a season — an eternity for a high schooler. Over the course of four years, 4 out of the 20 girls on that team will rupture an A.C.L.

Each of them will likely experience “a grief reaction,” says Dr. Jo Hannafin, orthopedic director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. “They’ve lost their sport and they’ve lost the kinship of their friends, which is almost as bad as not being able to play.”

Marshall says he feels a sense of urgency, because without a better understanding of the injury, the situation will get worse in coming years with the great numbers of girls playing sports — and the frequency and intensity of their play. In 1972, at the dawn of Title IX, about 300,000 girls participated in high-school sports. The number is now three million. Thirty thousand women played college sports pre-Title IX; about 205,000 now play.

“We’re studying an elite population at the service academies, but the big concern for me is the girl down the street who wants to play soccer on the rec team or the travel team,” Marshall told me. “They’re ripping their knees up, and they shouldn’t be. There’s got to be a way to prevent it. And we’re really on the up curve of this, because it’s still relatively recent that girls played sports in these large numbers. . . . So if you think we have a problem now, 10 years from now we’ll have a much bigger problem.”

ONE WEEKEND IN THE FALL OF 2007, I watched a soccer match involving two teams of 13-year-old girls in Southern California with Holly Silvers, a physical therapist and the director of research at the Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation. These were elite players, but from one end of the field to the other, Silvers pointed out girls she judged to have insufficient core muscle strength, balance or overall coordination to play safely. Their movement patterns put their knees — and probably their ankles, hips and backs — at risk.

“Look at the girl on the left back with the ponytail,” she said as we stood on the sideline of a game at the Home Depot Center, a vast complex of fields in Carson, Calif., where the men’s and women’s national soccer teams train. “She really concerns me.” At first I couldn’t pick out whom she meant; there were lots of ponytails out there. “No. 8,” she clarified, and I fixed my attention on a tall, stiff-legged girl whose upper and lower bodies seemed not to be in communication with each other. She ran bolt upright, with very little bend in her trunk. Her knees seemed not to flex. When she came to a stop or slowed to change directions, she landed flat-footed. “She’s got really poor form,” Silvers said. “She won’t hold up running like that.”

She pointed out another girl with possibly even worse form. She was one of the better players on the field, but Silvers said her advanced skills masked serious physical flaws. I asked her if she could fix the girl, given the opportunity. “Yes, I could,” she said. “In four to six weeks I could improve her a lot. In three months, I could get the job done. I would educate the muscles, educate the nerves. She could build strength and change her patterns.”

Silvers directed my attention to one more player, a girl who seemed light on her feet, quick and springy. When she changed directions, she stayed in what generations of gym teachers have called “the athletic position” — knees bent, butt low to the ground. Even when walking casually during stoppages in play, she seemed more lithe than the other girls. “She moves more like a boy,” Silvers said. “Believe me, that’s a good thing.”

Silvers, along with a Santa Monica orthopedic surgeon, Bert Mandelbaum, designed an A.C.L.-injury-prevention program that has been instituted and studied in the vast Coast Soccer League, a youth program in Southern California. Teams in a control group did their usual warm-ups before practices and games, usually light running and some stretching, if that. The others were enrolled in the foundation’s “PEP program,” a customized warm-up of stretching, strengthening and balancing exercises. An entire team can complete its 19 exercises — including side-to-side shuttle runs, backward runs and walking lunges — in 20 minutes. One goal is to strengthen abdominal muscles, which help set the whole body in protective athletic positions, and to improve balance through a series of plyometric exercises — forward, backward and lateral hops over a cone. Girls are instructed to “land softly,” or “like a spring.”

There is nothing complicated about the program. And nothing really exciting about it either — which, as with many preventive routines, is one of its challenges. As essential as it may be, it’s not as interesting as kicking a soccer ball around.

The Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation published results of its trial in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. The research was nonrandomized and therefore not the highest order of scientific research. (The caoches of teams doing the exercises made a choice to participate; the control group consisted of those who declined.) Nevertheless, the results were attention-grabbing.

The subjects were all between 14 and 18. In the 2000 soccer season, researchers calculated 37,476 athletic exposures for the PEP-trained players and 68,580 for the control group. Two girls in the trained group suffered A.C.L. ruptures that season, a rate of 0.05 per 1,000 exposures. Thirty-two girls in the control group suffered the injury — a rate of 0.47. (That was almost twice the rate for women playing N.C.A.A. soccer.) The foundation compiled numbers in the same league the following season and came up with similar results — a 74 percent reduction in A.C.L. tears among girls doing the PEP exercises.

The program has direct parallels with the research taking place at the military academies. Both are focused on biomechanics — the way athletes move — in no small part because gait patterns can be modified, unlike anatomical characteristics like wider hips. Marshall has been encouraged by information taken from the sensors attached to his subjects as they jump. “Women tend to be more erect and upright when they land, and they land harder,” he said. “They bend less through the knees and hips and the rest of their bodies, and they don’t absorb the impact of the landing in the same way that males do. I don’t want to sound horrible about it, but we can make a woman athlete run and jump more like a man.”

Silvers stressed the importance of training girls as young as possible, by their early teens or even younger. “Once something is learned neurally, it is never unlearned,” she said. “It never leaves you. That’s mostly good. It’s why motor skills are retained even after serious injuries. But ways of moving are also ingrained, which makes retraining more difficult with the older athletes. The younger girls are more like blank slates. They’re easier to work with.”

The PEP program, and others like it around the country, are not without their skeptics, who ask how you can try to solve a problem before you are even confident of its cause. Donald Shelbourne, an Indianapolis orthopedic surgeon and researcher, is perhaps the most vehement of the critics. “It’s like me taking antioxidants,” he says. “I don’t have cancer yet, so it’s working, right? These retraining programs play on emotions without data. They’re unproven. Jumping and landing is something that everyone knows how to do, and now we’ve got people saying, ‘We can teach you to do it better.’ I don’t buy it.”

caoches rarely like to give up precious practice time for injury prevention, and often have to be pushed by parents. As Diane Watanabe, an athletic trainer who is part of the Santa Monica research team, puts it: “caoches have to see a performance boost. Otherwise, they won’t do it. That’s the only way we can sell them on this program.”[...]

How I Pulled 700lbs

A post from Taylor;

How I pulled 700lbs

If you’re gonna deadlift heavy, the first thing you gotta learn is just be tenacious. You have to be willing to storm the gates of heaven, slap a Seraph in the mouth and take that big dead. You have to be willing to get hurt. It might happen. Before I managed 700, I promised myself I wouldn’t stop pulling until the bar began to descend again. If that meant it went down because I tore a bicep, so be it. Ya dig? Make your heart hard, and fucking get after it.

The routine was based a lot on instinct, so other than exercise selection and rep ranges, I can’t give ya much, and most of you have seen very similar things a million times. I did do a few things differently, more upper back volume/frequency and really changing my pulling often.

One thing I did a lot was rack pulls from 16″ (a couple inches below the knees for me) followed by deads. I would do the rack pulls crazy heavy. The DL I would do for pyramid singles, maybe 10 or 12. Pretty heavy, not “speed” shit. And yeah, I said pyramids. Of course you can’t just pull from a high height like that, so you have to cycle in normal deads and of course the dreaded platform dead. God I hate those. I don’t like a platform any higher than 3″, I feel like the load you sacrifice for the ROM isn’t worth it. But some people swear by very high platforms where there is barely room to get your fingers in because the bar is so close to your feet. See which one you work best with.

A lot of times I would call it a day there, because I’d really bust my nuts on those two. Otherwise, I’d hit RDL’s ir Snatch grips for 4-5 sets of 3-5 reps, BB rows for 3-6 sets of 3-5, GHR for 4-6 sets of 6-12 and maybe finish up with some shrugs and DB rows. Shrugs should be done both sloppy and strict, DB rows should be done very strict IMO.

After pressing, I would do six sets of strict BB rows, lots of rear delts and prehab type upper back stuff. On a seperate day I would do strict snatch grip shrugs for 20-25 reps, 6-10 sets.

Another thing I did is actually went with an internet fed and tried the exaggerated Konstantinov upper back slump. It worked well for me. Hit my 680 PR the first time I tried it. Now, personally I don’t use that style week in, week out, but it’s a keeper for me when going after PR’s. That’s part of why all the upper back helped though, because my glutes aren’t as huge and diesel as they once were, so at the top I could wrench that shit back with my upper back.This makes your lats grow like crazy and your middle tarps super thick.

So, don’t be a scared little bitch, do tons of upper back while keeping some glute/ham work in there (I should have done more) even the little shit like band pull aparts and kelso rows, practice form (the singles) and fucking handle it.

As a side note, I should point out that the job I got shortly before the PR ramped my physical activity level up many orders of magnitude. I am probably in the best “shape” of my life. I haven’t been this light since my sophomore year of highschool, and I was shorter and fatter. So crazy GPP (for me).