Before a couple weeks ago,* I’d never ran more than five miles (and those five miles were on a treadmill). On a whim, I signed up for Tough Mudder with some coworkers. I knew I wasn’t ready, but at the time I had about 8 weeks to train and decided that was good enough.
Two weeks later, when I realized I hadn’t trained at all, I started panic. I didn’t lift free weights unless it was
5lb dumbbells in a cardio aerobics class and I was out of shape with my jogging too.
That’s when Peter Baker came to the rescue with excellent advice that kept me motivated and helped
me avoid injury: Keep it easy. Because I hadn’t ever tried to lift anything heavy before, I didn’t know
what I was capable of. It may sound puny, but I was shocked and amazed to learn I could sumo deadlift 60
lbs. on my first day with no problem. And over time that grew to 65, 70 and 75 pounds.
I started jogging again, but kept it easy. To keep the motivation going, I signed up for a 5k and 10k that
took place several weeks before the 12-mile, 24-obstacle Tough Mudder. I took an easy pace at both the
5k and 10k and felt fine afterward. Then the big day came, and it was fine. I was definitely exhausted
afterward and needed help over the big walls, but I did it. I survived a 12-mile, 24-obstacle Tough
Mudder---my greatest physical accomplishment to date---and I had fun doing it.
I’ve signed up for the 6-mile, 25-obstacle Savage Race in April and I fully intend to do Tough Mudder
again next year. Best of all, I feel good and I’m having fun staying in shape.
PFB's commentary: Abby, I never doubted you a moment.
On 19 November, I squatted 450 lbs. I managed three singles. That marks a 105lb increase from last year. Most of you who read this have already gotten the idea that I squat every training session and that I do a variety of squatting movements to maintain that type of consistency.
A candid shot of my girlfriend doing a back squat.
I intend to explain to you readers out there how you can squat better and frequently to increase your squatting efforts to put up higher numbers.
Jim Wendler wrote an article about some of the things I will cover. Read it here.
One of the first things you can do to vary your squat is monitor your hand placement. You can test it, or just do it and hope for the best. You'll want to find an optimal place to place your hands on the bar. A lot of reliable sources say get your grip as close to your shoulders as possible. Lots of records have also been broken with a really wide grip. You will probably want to experiment with that one on your own to figure out whats comfortable.
Here's a tip: using an asymmetric grip--one hand closer to your shoulder and the other not as close, in this particular instance--can help you get the level of flexibility required to attain a comfortable close grip, and might feel better if one of your elbows and shoulders is fucked up from benching too much without perorming any contraspecifics.
The same goes for a false grip. Do which one is comfortable. Or what tests the best. I've heard arguments in favor of the full grip along the lines of being able to use more tension and being safer, as well as arguments in favor of the false grip saying that it is safer if you to bail from the weight. Use the squat cage and find some spotters if you have to do that sort of thing.
The next item of import is feet placement. This can range from really fucking wide to just about shoulder with. Your strengths and body shape will determine the best form for you to use. You might even get away with a couple of different types. This is a good thing, and will lead to more frequent squatting.
Test out an asymmetrical stance, too. You might be pleasantly surprised at how good it actually feels. It can be slight, anything like having on foot slightly in front of the other, or one foot with more of a turnout than the other. Of late, my right foot is slightly behind my left foot when I squat.
Once you have the stance width figured out, your next job is to figure out how much to rotate your feet. Your limitations will determine this. For some variations, more rotation will work compared to less. Remember, there is no right or wrong.
In the above video, feet have a good bit of external rotation--not to the point where it's like Charlie Chaplin or anything--and the grip is so close it must make every large and inflexible powerlifter cringe.
Here is the opposite--a short guy with a wider stance and wider grip who has set a record or two in the Raw United Federation.
Tony Conyers (above) is probably one of the nicest and pound for pound strongest dudes I have met. Interestingly enough, since we talk often I ask him what his training is like. He recently told me that he is switching his training schedule to twice a week, as opposed to the once a week program he was on. He is doing so in preparation for Raw Unity this February.
Another way to vary your squat is by varying the tool you use. I have mentioned these before, but today I am going to talk about the safety bar. The bottom line is that if you can handle heavy weights on the safety bar, your regular squat will go up. The difference between your max and your safety bar max can be one or two hundred pounds. I managed 345 for a set of one, and had to bail trying 355. One guy at the gym who does pause squats for 800+ keeps his safety bar squats between five and six hundred lbs. So choose cautiously when you use this tool.
The leverage of this movement will be different than your back squat, so your feet placement definitely will not be the same. For my my safety squat stance is very narrow compared to what I did in the above video with the back squat, and sometimes my feet are turned out less than normal (but that's highly variable for me).
The other advantage to the safety bar is that since your hands are out in front of you, you can keep a comfortable arm position if your shoulders and elbows are injured. And you also get the option of manipulating the leverage by pressing the handles so that they are continually parallel to the floor, or keeping the handles resting without your assistance, like the woman in the video.
For me, the safety bar helped out because I still get to squat, but I feel a greater emphasis on my abs and my quads which makes it a swell tool to add for variety.
In order to maximize it for you, one idea would be to take these variations, find your stance, and do them without and with a box. There you have four different squat varieties you can do to keep your squats up for an entire week, even when it isn't "leg day."
If you intend to squat at a higher frequency, make sure you use the minimal effective amount of effort. Squats can be taxing, and doing them daily can be too. Going balls to the wall is not the way to go if you plan on going for daily squatting. Using the minimal effective amount of effort will keep you to a point where you can build up to frequent squatting.
Now, for a note on variety. These aren't completely random exercises with no purpose. Will the variations be different than your standard back squat? Of course. Will the leverages, and paths of the bar be different? Of course. Are you still squatting, despite all that? Yes? Good. If those deviations in form will fuck you up so bad that you can't do your competition lift in practice, you might want to reevaluate your life.
I say this because a guy at the gym saw me lifting using some Fat Gripz attachments. He said his grip strength sucked. I told him he might want to train his grip. I advised him that since he had military presses left, he could try them out on his barbell military press. He did. His refusal to press with the Fat Gripz hinged on the fact that he 1. wouldn't abandon the false grip, 2. wouldn't do his pressing any other way than from behind his neck, and 3. wouldn't deal with a different bar path. I am not ripping on the guy too much--I Have seen him put up some impressive numbers in competition and respect him as a lifter. But to overlook the obvious fact that you want to fix something, and it might be different than normal, but won't make the change to do so is patently absurd and rather dogmatic to me.
There is a reason it is called variety. It is going to be a little different, yet still train the same general movement, which will better your skill set. It will also help you get higher numbers.
To be honest, in light of the crap I was physically dealing with this year I am surprised I was able to hit a 500lb deadlift, much less a 400lb deadlift. Though at the beginning of October, my PR was only 40lbs up from the competition ten months before, I expect that to go up by another 20lbs. If you aren't increasing your deadlift at a rate of speed your satisfied with--or at least able to deal with, if satisfaction is not possible--do something different. Deadlift more, and deadlift with varieties and do more contraspecifics.
A deadlift is a hip hinge. Pretty simple, right? Yes. There's also a shitload of ways to hinge at the hips. Testing this sort of thing will be of great help to you, since it will allow you to hip hinge more often.
One of the first ways to get started is to test out the difference between a conventional stance and a sumo stance. This shit is your call. You have your own form for each, and it won't be the same as mine or anyone else's form. The best we can agree on is that a conventional stance has a narrower distance between your feet, and your hands will be on the outside of your legs.
The sumo stance has a wide(er) stance, depending on who you are and your biomechanics. And your arms will be inside of your legs. If you have ever done ballet, think second position plie.
What do you do if those don't test well? Shorten the range of motion, and see if that tests well. You can do rack pulls, or Plateau Buster Swing Handle Deadlifts. You can find innovative ways to further vary the heights of those lifts too. Racks are adjustable, and you can use all sorts of size plates on your Plateau Buster.
There's Arielle and myself demonstrating these things. She catapulted her deadlift from a mere 155 to 285 since March using this model.
Now, you might be asking yourself "I tested out all that shit, and it still won't test well. What the fuck do I do?"
Fear not. One of the best alternatives is to squat. Just in general, this is a good idea. Its a variety of hip hinge, it makes your ass look nice, and provides more range of motion than a deadlift.
On to the subject of your spine. A lot of people give us at the Movement a lot of grief about some of the shit that we do that looks really fucking odd. The reason it looks so odd is because we promote moving as much and in as many ways as you can. So applying this line of reasoning to our deadlift, we come up with cool variations to test.
Here is a good one.
This is a one handed deadlift. Easy note is the fact that it is good for your grip. It's also good for practicing your spinal rotation. Since your spine is capable of it, you might want to do it. If you have ever moved shit up flights of stairs, or picked up weird shit, this sort of thing happens. You don't want to be that guy who shits his spine out on the slightest rotation because you deadlifted the exact same way for years and years.
Here are some other good ones too. I am a big fan of the Jefferson lift with the eagle loops. It is a huge confidence builder, it is asymmetric, and it gives you a feeling of picking up heavy ass weight. You will do more in this than in your conventional or sumo stances. It is also good for spinal rotation. Ditto the dinnie lifts. I can't speak much for them other than they are done on rings, which is a different way to tax the grip. Perhaps I will try them one day when I get some rings. The axle is also a good one to throw up in the "things to test" section, since it is close to a regular deadlift.
Adam explains the model sort of too in this one. If you look over his video training log, you can see as he explained that all the shit he did allowed him to deadlift again.
This is not an exhaustive list of deadlift variations. There are a lot more. I think I have mentioned swinging a shitload of times so that it doesn't need repeating. There are also things you can do with your hands to change it. Use youtube, or your own creativity to figure it out.
If all this fails, test your contraspecific movements. Some of my favorites include hanging leg raises, hanging leg raises to a tuck, sit-ups (weighted), pull-ups in an L-sit, and reverse hyper extensions. I figured these would be most common to all of you, I didn't link a video.
On second thought, this chick is hot, so I will put a revers hyper video up.
Hopefully, these will help you if your deadlift fucking sucks. Drop me a line and let me know.
I'm pretty sure she hinges her hips at some point in her life.
One of the things we strive for at The Movement is to practice specificity. So, in the context of me, that would mean practicing the powerlifts with their cues as often as possible. I hadn't done so at all this year because I was worried about getting out of pain. Now, I am out of pain. So last Saturday I decided it was time to give it a go under contest conditions. I was nervous that the lack of deadlifting would have affected my total (before the mini meet, 1055) negatively--I have only pulled the way I would at a meet 26 times this year as of last night. However, I was nicely surprised.
I arrived at the Powerhouse at 9am ready to lift with a bunch of people I had never met, and a few I knew already. Among them, several badasses and overall great dudes: Tony Conyers, Layne Norton and Jon Bernor. The latter two I train around and with occasionally, and despite what the morons on forums say, Layne is a very approachable and knowledgeable guy. In addition to that, he gets psyched up for lifts, so that I don't have to.
I didn't warm up, it didn't test well and all my lifts were as follows:
Squat: 380, 410, 430.
Bench: 245, 260, and a miss at 270
Deadlift: 460, 480, 500.
Though it is not the best I could have done, I am extremely proud that I added 40lbs to my deadlift and 90lbs to my squat. And a paltry five pounds to my bench. That ups the total by 135lbs (1190 if you can't add) in just shy of ten months since the last competition. Bodyweight this time around was 177, no cutting involved. I think the majority of the bench problems are involving me not finding out what works, and me not enjoying the lift nearly as much as the other two. Incidentally, due to the injury I got to really enjoy squats because that was all I could do for a while. And once that cleared up, I got to do them with more weight.
Once I was able to deadlift again, shit got real.
One thing I will address now, is how I added 90lbs to the squat. I have talked about it before, but it still baffles some people. Since 29 September 2011 I have squatted 154 times. My max was kicking about 330 or so. Out of the 154 times, five sessions were box squats with a cambered bar, 34, were with the safety bar to a box below parallel, 68 were with a regular bar to the same box, 32 were competition squats with no box. The rest were with the safety bar and no box. How can a human withstand all that? By stopping when it gets difficult. No, that's not a joke.
My deadlift went up the way it did due to the technical issues of my own form and possibly due to doing so many box squats. Compare the above to the below:
Big difference. I wish I had gotten 500 on tape, but I was busy worrying about lifting and decided to not worry about it. Rest assured, by next competition (8 December) I will add more pounds to the total and meet at least 1220 with a 520lb deadlift.
Apparently, deadlifting is popular among the women of Scotland.
This is a picture of me about to squat 405lbs. This was the first time I had ever done so, and is 60lbs heavier than my best competition squat which was 340lbs on 10 December 2011. After being rendered virtually useless for the first half of the year, I think this is decent progress. And since the next competition is not til December, I think I will shatter this mild milestone then too.
I did this the same way I always do. I do a shitload of box squatting with a safety bar and with a straight bar. I do infrequent amounts of squats without the box. Why? The box tests well more often than it does not. On 27 August I managed to do two challenging singles with 375 on the box. A month later--25 September--on the box, I did the same weight for four sets of doubles. They were also much easier.
Actual squatting became more frequent in August. Absolute best on that was 365 for three doubles on 21 September. And now today. 405 for 3 singles.
Something that I tested that helped and could help you too is testing your squat stance and doing as many goddamn types you can do. Some days squats from the bottom of the rack tested best. Other days, it may have been the cambered bar, the safety bar or the straight bar. And box or no box. Something you can also test which may freak some of you out, is the amount of knee and hip flexion you use in your squat. Some days I would do a movement pattern which left me in a more upright position and with more knee flexion than normal, and other days I would flex the hips as much as I could for the movement. Once these variables came into play, the volume took off, and apparently so did my max.
Before I conclude, I will relay a funny story. Two nights ago, while I was in the middle of my sets of doubles with 375 on the squat, my ex girlfriend was doing squats next to me in the other rack. Yes, it is possible to remain good friends with an ex, if you aren't a retard and the ending wasn't murderous or otherwise terrible.
So we are doing our squats, and chatting and what not when up walks this short, fat, bald motherfucker wearing a Pantera shirt and most likely intoxicated. Apparently, he was once a big time body builder, though his physique reflected nothing of the kind. He proceeded to take his shirt off and flex. To attempt to diffuse the situation, I ask my friend for a spot. Now, her being 5'2, and lean does not mean she isn't strong. In four months of training starting as a novice, she can already deadlift 240lbs, and squat at least 185. So, for spotting heavier stuff, I definitely trust her. This guy did not trust her. He immediately pipes in and says, "I got you, bro." To which I said, "No, I would rather her do it."
At this point she walked away and this guy attempted to squat 375. He claimed it was racked too high. Bummer. He then took her 175 lbs, and gave it a quarter squat, though it looked like an eighth squat. On my next set, he then told me I needed knee wraps, which is where I lost it.
The last story was merely for humor, I hope the rest of this was useful.
Training was probably the most fun it has been in a while. I can finally deadlift with regularity again, now that my pain levels are at zero and are resolved. The form is different than before, and the other deadlift variants have helped me out a lot as well, possibly due to the inclusion of spinal rotation.
