by Jamie Lewis
Making Your Deadlift Even More Deadly
Much has been made, on sundry message boards, of my refusal to do the deadlift in the gym. Many have decided to ape my methods due a variety of factors, though the most predominant one, in my mind, is the fact that the deadlift is the hardest fucking thing you'll do in the gym, nine times out of ten. It's a brutal, gut-wrenching, man-making lift during which you can actually feel your testicles drop, and afterwards, you sound like Barry White, provided you've got enough weight on the bar. Skipping the deadlift, then, is usually nothing more than caving into the fear of hard work, a fear that's more ubiquitous in our society than rhinestones on a tranny's Saturday night wardrobe.
Why, then, do I skip it?
Because unlike most people, I've earned the right to do so, and I'm focused on the squat. As I stated in the introduction, it’s nearly impossible to be epic at both the squat and the deadlift. That’s not to say you should completely neglect one or the other, but rather that if you’re entirely focused on the one, your training for the other will have to be altered. Luckily, I’ve found that even if you pull conventionally, there’s still a decent amount of carryover from the squat to the deadlift. Thus, if your squat’s going up and that’s your focus, your deadlift is going to follow. Unfortunately, the obverse is not as true, although there is some carryover if you pull sumo.
For at least a decade, I deadlifted more in a year than most of you have masturbated in your lives. I pounded the shit out of the lift, doing every conceivable variation for innumerable sets and reps. My deadlift workouts took, on average, 90 minutes, and ran the gamut in design from half an hour of pulling singles with 90% of my one rep max for max reps (my record was 27), to 10-8-6-4-2-2-4-6-8-10, to German Volume Training, to 5 sets of 5 followed by a death set with 315, to an utterly ridiculous workout consisting of deadlifts, one arm deads, two finger deads, rack pulls, and shrugs.
That was, in fact, a workout I used for over a year, and resulted in mid-back cramping I still experience when I pull, a decade later. It did, however, give me a gym best of 545 at a bodyweight of 165. Once I hit 600 for a single, however, I noticed that the high-percentage lifts that had gotten me to that point were killing a variety of other lifts, as my back would be too sore and too exhausted to allow me to do other lifts that I loved— namely, the back squat and overhead pressing. Thus, I started dropping deadlift workouts but added specific movements that would have a lot of carryover into the deadlift. These exercises, combined with squat workouts so frequent and brutal that I could hang with most Bulgarians, have kept my deadlift moving forward in spite of the fact that I’ve removed it from my training.
If you choose to be a deadlift specialist, however, you’re going to need to have single-minded focus on that lift that rivals a foot fetishist’s focus in the women’s shoe department in an upscale shoe store. That’s the way I initially got my deadlift to respectable levels, and it’s the only way you can take your deadlift from decent to epic. Before you head off to the gym with a heart full of hate and blood in your eyes, ready to do damage on the deadlift, bear this in mind- the deadlift is not something at which you will immediately excel. Certainly, it’s a lift at which you can quickly achieve competence, unless you’re taking the advice of people on internet message boards, all of whom seem to think 315 is a laudable goal for a male weighing over 150 lbs.
In case you think it is, it’s not— that is a point at which you can stop being utterly embarrassed about deadlifting, nothing more. 315 is a milestone only in that it’s the day you can stop hanging your head in shame when you enter the gym, rather than a milestone worth mentioning to strangers with a heart full of pride. That might sting to hear, but frankly, if you’ve been training for more than two years and you can’t pull 315, you should feel nothing but crushing depression. For women and men under 150, 255’s pretty much your shame threshold.
Thus, if you’re in the shamed category, you should pay close attention to the following and then head directly to the gym to wreck shop. Actually, fuck that— you should head to the gym and wreck shop irrespective of your relative strength level, because after reading the following you should be pumped as hell to tear into the deadlift like a fat person into a Vegas buffet.
There Will Be Fucking Murders
Murdering the deadlift is much like committing an actual murder. The first step in a successful murder is the formulation of a plan for the murder’s execution. Unfortunately, just as many deadlift routines seem to bog down in the planning stages as do successful murders. This has led many of you to engage in debates online so insipid that they would shock even the least functional simpleton, as that simpleton certainly would not ask another retard for advice on how to do long division— he'd instead emulate the actions of people who do long division well. Worse yet, the planning stage for many of you seems to stall at the simplest and most basic of stages— determining which stance to use. This, then, leads to interminable debates about the efficacy of each stance, citing official-sounding yet vapid “facts” about the biomechanical advantages of each.
At this point, you should remind yourself that 99.9% of the message board gurus have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, and are certainly weaker than random go-getters who just go into the gym and yank the fucking bar off the ground. As such, you should avoid these debates like the plague that they are. Planning your deadlift workouts shouldn’t be terribly difficult— as you’ll soon see, there are some none-too-bright guys who have pulled tremendous amounts of weight through out history.
Despite that, you will need to put some thought into how you’ll deadlift, so that when you finally approach the bar, all you have to worry about is pulling. You, then, need to determine which style of deadlift you’ll adopt as your own, and finally hone your technique in it with repetition to get awesome at it. There’s not much more to the deadlift than that— pick a style, stick with it, and then get brutally strong.
How to select the perfect stance for you
To find your perfect stance, you should do what anyone worth half a shit has done before you— experiment. Bob Peoples, the greatest 181 pound deadlifter prior to the arrival of chimp-like freak of nature Ed Coan put the record out of everyone's reach, experimented constantly with his form, and eventually developed a form more unique than the penises on Body Modification E-zine (you know, the guys who brought us that Pain Olympic video with people hacking at their cocks with hatchets and the like). Through years of experimentation, Peoples eventually pulled 728 at a bodyweight of 178, using form that could only be described by any “guru” as horrific— he pulled with a round back and stiff legs, after completely exhaling, and with a double overhand grip (Hise). That's right— years of experimentation led him to set a record that stood for decades with form that still stands as perhaps the most unique in history.
"Our deadlift champion began to study his body leverages and gravity centers. He would take a bar in a starting deadlift position and view himself an a mirror and notice by the raising or lowering of the bar as he changed grips, using different height shoes, inhaling slightly, inhaling heavily, exhaling slightly, exhaling heavily and observing the positions and conditions that suited him best" (Hise, Deadlifter).
Bob Peoples’ record setting form would be regarded with naught but horror by most, and would certainly get the idiots on Youtube to claim that it should send his spinal column soaring into the air, give him AIDS, and could only be the product of massive steroid use— weak people are incredibly overdramatic. Despite what weak people and personal trainers the world over would proclaim about Peoples' form, “his deadlift style.... is not "incorrect" for him because his type of physique with rather long legs, short trunk and very long arms makes it the best style for him” (Peoples).
One might think that if they could describe their body type similarly, this form should allow them to match Peoples’ numbers with identical form. That, however, dramatically oversimplifies the extraordinarily complex issue of biochemical and
biomechanical individuality between humans. No two people are alike in their leverages, unless they happen to be clones, owing to differing limb lengths, bone thickness, tendon and ligament strength, muscle fiber type composition, muscular insertion positioning, and a variety of other factors too lengthy to name. Should you feel it necessary to call bullshit, consider this— Bob Peoples’ body type has been ascribed to another amazing deadlifter with completely different deadlift style, and his unique form led him to break Peoples’ long-standing record by a considerable margin. You might have heard of him— Ed Coan. Coan is five feet five inches tall and boasts arms that nearly hang to his knees, due to the fact that his arms and legs were incredibly long compared to the length of his trunk. Because he's built as if he were the unholy child of a chimpanzee and a postal box, Coan had incredible success deadlifting. At 181, Coan pulled 793; at 198, he pulled 859; at 219, he pulled 901; and at 241 he pulled 887 (Gallagher 60).
Like Peoples, Coan also pulled with a unique style, as his stance wasn’t quite as wide as what you typically seem in a sumo stance, and his hand placement was fairly wide— just inside his knees. This contradicts conventional sumo deadlifting due to the fact that the narrow foot placement and wide grip doesn't appear to make the best use of that style. If you’re unaware, the primary directive of sumo deadlifting is to reduce the bar path to the shortest possible distance, and is for that reason often decried by weak people as providing sumo lifters with an unfair advantage. Coan apparently didn't give a shit what people thought about his form, because he experimented until he happened upon the unique form that produced deadlifts that may never be exceeded. An interesting postscript to the Coan story is that he switched to conventional late in his career, apparently due to an injury. This is why his deadlift at 252 was lower than his deadlift at 220. His conventional form was just as unorthodox as his sumo form, however, as all he seems to have done is placed his hand where his shins had touched the bar previously, and his shins where he’d formerly gripped the bar. Thus, instead of taking a narrow sumo stance with a wide grip, he took a wide conventional stance with a slightly wide grip.
These examples should point you to one inalienable fact— the basic structure of body has little to do with the form you should utilize to maximize your deadlift. Instead, you should employ whatever form you find to be most comfortable after experimenting with them both. If you have comparatively long arms and a short torso, guess what? It doesn’t mean you should deadlift with a certain form— it means you’re destined to be a badass deadlifter if you bust your ass at the lift. Any attempt to analyze leverages to determine your best style is absurd for a multitude of reasons:
It fails to consider a wide array of biochemical and biomechanical variances between humans as I mentioned above.
It fails to account for past activities in which you might have engaged that would increase your neurological adaptations to certain movements.
It overthinks what will essentially amounts to a battle of wills between you and the weight. All of the leverages in the world won’t get 600 pounds off the ground if you don’t hate the fact that the weight is defying your will.
One caveat to this is for chicks— I think females are likely more suited to sumo deadlifting because the structure of their hips allows them to comfortably spread their legs wider. Between the greater angle of their pelvis and the pelvis’s enlarged size, sumo seems to be a better choice for women just from a structural standpoint. Additionally, they're almost invariably lower-body dominant, and the sumo deadlift employs far more of your vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, and (oddly) your tibialis anterior than does the conventional deadlift (Escamilla). One other thing I think makes the sumo deadlift a better choice for women is the fact that, due to their hips, squatting with a wide stance generally results in a massive increase in a female lifter's squat, and most of the high-level female squatters I've seen seem to use a wide stance. That stance and strength can translate well to the sumo deadlift, which as Ed Coan put it, amounts to a reverse squat (Gallagher 61). That doesn't necessarily mean chicks can't pull well conventional or shouldn't try, but rather that I think they'd likely find sumo to feel more natural as a movement than conventional and they would likely find that they’re stronger with that form as a general rule.
Lest you wring your hands and pout due to the frustration of having to think for yourself on picking a style, author and lifter Derek Barker had a great idea on how to determine it. He suggests you do Louie Simmons' five week deadlift program twice, using conventional form once and sumo the other. Thereafter, you can examine your progress with each and choose the style that best suits you.
In Barker's words:
"The program started with the lifter having achieved a max single in the deadlift coming into the program. In the first week, the lifter was then to perform 15 singles with 65 percent of that single with short rest periods. For the next week, the percentage was raised five percent and the [number of singles] dropped to 12. This goes on until the fifth week when the lifter has reached 85 percent and performs six singles.
I feel this program is vastly superior to any other for new lifters because by using weights in this percent range, the lifter is able to focus on his technique and think through the lift rather than get all psyched up and possibly miss or just muscle the barbell up. In addition, weights of 85-100 percent for a new lifter may in fact reinforce bad technique rather than correct it. In the sixth week, the lifter should attempt a new max in the deadlift.
Here’s my advice— for the first training wave, pull conventional. Play around with the conventional stance and find what suits you best (shoulder width stance, very close heels touching, feet angled out). Experiment and find an optimal pulling stance.
After a new max has been attempted and hopefully achieved in week six, start the cycle over, this time with a sumo stance. Again, experiment with foot stance such as an ultra wide sumo or a more moderate sumo. Play around with the angle of the feet. A good rule of thumb is to have them angled out at least 45 degrees to keep your center of gravity as close to the barbell as possible. Go through the cycle, and on the sixth week, attempt a max with the sumo stance. Now, you’ve spent three concentrated months on your deadlift, so you should have a good idea what your particular strengths and weaknesses are with each and what style allows you to lift the most weight. Regardless of which style you choose, it’s important to still train the opposite style at some point. One style will help the other" (Barker).
Utilizing the advice above, you will at the very least determine which style suits you best from a comfort standpoint. By comfort, I don’t mean that you should feel like you’re ensconced in a velvety overstuffed couch while pulling— I mean the one that seems to strain a specific body part the least, and that flows the smoothest. I personally lack the hip flexibility to get into the starting position for the sumo deadlift without incurring a considerable amount of pain, which is one of the reasons why I pull conventional, for instance. After 6 weeks of each form, you should determine which style of pull leaves you crippled and which gives you the greatest PRs.
One form question few people ask, though I think is the cause of many of the torn biceps you see in deadlifting, is in regards to the grip one takes. Years ago, I had someone ask me which hand should pronate and which should supinate, and it occurred to me I never gave it any thought. While pondering this, I looked down at my hands, which were hanging at my sides, and realize that the one that was pronated (facing my body) was the one I pronated in the deadlift, and vice-versa. Then, I looked at their hands and let them know which hand appeared to be more pronated than the other. If you're unsure about what grip would be best for you, stand with your arms hanging relaxed at your sides and have someone look at them and tell you. It should be fairly apparent. Provided you pronate and supinate your hands correctly and don’t start your deadlift with bent arms, you should be able to avoid torn biceps for the duration of your life.
Here’s a rather extreme example to s
how what I mean:
Like I said, a rather extreme example, but it illustrates my point nicely. Given that her left hand naturally supinates, it is the one that should grip the bar underhand. The other hand naturally pronates, and thus should be overhand. I’ve seen a tremendous amount of dithering in determining which hand should go in which direction, but a simple check of your own hands should answer the question for you quickly and easily.
The greats in deadlifting all appear to have a great deal in common— first, they've all done some ridiculously high volume routines, which would indicate to me that they love lifting more than Lindsay Lohan loves cocaine, they border on self-flagellating-priest style masochism, they're built (to scale) like gorillas, and they actually think about how to make themselves better, rather than consulting with a pack of weak know-nothings on the internet. Asking a kid who's marginally better than you at something about how he got there is about as sensible as a Jew asking a Nazi to hold the oven door for him while he tries to clean its back wall. Don't be stupid. If you read about any of the greats, they didn't get great by following routines prescribed by people weaker than a 19th Century railroader with tuberculosis- they took the advice and followed the routines of exceptionally strong people. Not marginally strong— EXCEPTIONALLY strong.