by Jamie Lewis
Competition:
Training:
Zaugolova’s methods in this seems to echo the sentiments of the Finn deadlifters, who as you’ll recall train every conceivable variety of pull as often as they can possibly manage.
Wrapping up the Routines of the Greats
If you hadn’t noticed in the preceding pages, a cursory overview of their stances, grips, and routines will clue you into one profound fact— even the best pullers on Earth, people designed by the gods specifically for deadlifting, cannot agree on a single program or technique that's universally best for success. They all seem experiment in ways that would bring a smile to mad scientists like Nikola Tesla, however, and throw themselves bodily into their training. A couple of commonalities jump of the preceding pages if you look closely, though, and they are as follows. If you want to be a deadlift master, you must adhere to the following golden rules:
Don't be a pussy.
Condition yourself to handle brutally heavy workloads, especially for your legs and back, both in and out of the gym. This means general physical preparation activities are your friends, and pushing the prowler a couple of times a week could mean the difference between winning handily and having your ass handed to you on the platform.
Pull like a 15 year old with the internet, Jergens, and a fistful of cock. The more you pull, the better you’ll get at it. Add a death set at the end of your deadlift sessions to inure yourself to the oft-despised-though-it-should be appreciated grey-out. Greying out at the end of a heavy deadlift should be a matter of course— if you train to embrace it with death sets using 50-60% of your one rep max at the end of a session, you’ll not fear the grey-out as much and will learn to push through it. The grey-out is your friend— it tells you that your reward for pushing yourself to the absolute limit is a nap. A word of advice, however— when you notice your vision narrowing and know the grey-out is coming on, drop to a squat and take deep breaths when you drop the bar. Do not try to walk off the platform, as you’ll likely smash your face open on something hard and metal. If you’re not graying out on a one rep max or death set, you can be 100% sure you didn’t go hard enough.
Test yourself. You'll never know how much is too much until you actually do too much. Once you determine how much is too much, do a little less than that.
Don't forget to not be a pussy. 90% of deadlifting is a combination of hate for failure and big brass balls. The remaining 10% is technique.
Tools To Make Your Deadlift Even More Deadly
Before I jump into my technique tips, favorite routines, and favorite assistance lifts, I'll mention that I agree with Louie Simmons on at least one thing— "deadlift" as much as you can every week. That's not to say you're actually going to deadlift, but you would be doing something to help your deadlift nearly every day. Chuck Vogelpohl was famous for hitting the gym 10-14 times per week, hitting abs every time and lats five times a week (Simmons). He did this to build a base for deadlifting, and to keep his body conditioned to the incredible stress deadlifting puts on your body. Though I had no knowledge of his routine previously, he and I are pretty much two tits in a bikini top on this issue, since I do something very similar. I do a combination of weighted and unweighted ab work at least 4x per week, upper back work in my morning workouts in the form of face pulls, pullups, high cable rows, or behind the neck pulldowns with a narrow grip, and hit back very heavily at least twice per week with one of the exercises listed in this section.
My Deadliest Deadlift Routines
Over the last 20 or so years, I've tried more permutations of programming than any neophyte could possibly imagine. Given that the deadlift was my pet exercise for the better part of those 20 years, I've more or less acted like Pepe LePiew with the deadlift, and have come up with more rape and stalking strategies (for the deadlift) than he did for cartoon broads. That is to say, a fucking lot of them. My favorite deadlift workout, though, would have to be one of the following two. The first was one I used, religiously getting to a 500+ deadlift about ten years ago at a bodyweight of around 160, and the latter is one up with which I came in 2009 out of a combination of masochism and boredom.
To The Death
At the time, I had about a 500 lb deadlift. For the warmup weights, adjust downward if your deadlift is considerably less than that so that you get four warmup sets that are relatively equally spaced in weight jumps.
Deadlift
1x5x135
1x5x225
1x5x315
1x5x405
6-8 x 3 - 1 x 435-455 (between 85 and 90% of your 1RM)
I started with 435 for three and then added weight depending on whether or not I got three reps. After the first set, I’d get as many as I could. If I couldn’t get more than one, I’d use that for the remainder of the sets. Thus, once I got to 455 I went until it got nearly impossible to finish a rep, which was around the 6th set. When you’re hitting 8 singles with 90% of your 1RM with no problem and no more than 120 second rests between pulls, increase your starting weight by 5 to 10 lbs.
Death Set: Max reps on deadlift x 315 (63% of my 1RM at the time)
My record was somewhere around 20, at which point I usually greyed out and slumped to the floor. The death set is an indispensible method for getting good at the deadlift. If you’re avoiding it, that avoidance stems from fear. Face your fear and attack ~60% of your one rep max with all of the fury of a Viking berserker storming a beach after rowing over rough seas for 5 days. You’re cold, wet, tired, and fucking PISSED. Get angry at the weight and make it your punk bitch.
Rest When You're Dead
Deadlift (Weights for ~600lb max)
1x1x135
1x1x225
1x1x315
1x1x405
Max x 1 x 515 in 30 minutes. You will have to watch the clock on this one and deadlift for exactly 30 minutes. You’ll pull 85-90% of your 1RM as many times as I could. Once I got comfortable with this type of routine, I began pulling doubles and triples at the outset, then dropped to singles to keep the pace quick. Once you’re hitting between 20 and 25 reps (use your judgment on this one), raise the weight. This routine will condition you like no other, and enabled me to pull high percentages of my one rep max with no warmup whatsoever. While doing this routine on a regular basis, I pulled 515 easily on a cold day in jeans and a hoodie with no warmup whatsoever to prove a point to a guy to whom I was talking. When I mean you’ll be highly conditioned for pulling, I mean highly conditioned.
Running the Ladder
I did this program a great deal in my early years after picking it up from an Iron Man magazine and used it for both the squat and the deadlift. It raised both considerably. Due to the volume, I would not recommend doing deadlifts more than once a week with this routine. Assuming a 405 max (which is what I had at the time at a bodyweight of 134), I did the following. The weights are not so important as the rep scheme, incidentally.
1 x 10 x 135
1 x 8 x 225
1 x 6 x 275
1 x 4 x 315
1 x 2 x 355
1 x 2 x 365-375
1 x 4 x 315
1 x 6 x 285
1 x 8 x 265
1 x 10 x 225
The key in this routine is to make sure that your second half of the ladder is noticeably heavier than the first half. It’s great for breaking plateaus and ruts, and also for getting your comfortable with your form on the deadlift.
The Deadliest Assistance Movements
The following are my favorite accessory movements for the deadlift. I'm not going to get into the biomechanics of each, as doing so is generally the purview of people who fail to realize that the biomechanics are going to range from subtly to wildly different for each lifter based on their leverages, relative muscular strengths, and individual technique variations. You'll also note that the very same people who will babble on about the biomechanics of lifts are generally shitty lifters hiding behind textbooks. They're little more capable in terms of educating someone on the proper m
ethods for completing an elite level lift than is a man who's read a shitload of carpentry books but barely touched a hammer would be if he were to educate you on the whys and wherefores of mansion construction.
What I do when selecting an accessory exercise is examine movements that resemble my main lift in whole or part and then incorporate that movement to shore up weak points and strengthen my overall support structure. This means I'm using my brain to determine for myself which exercise is best, rather than nitpicking pointless minutia and dithering over physiological and neurological responses to various loading protocols in sundry angles to facilitate the greatest hypertrophy, or whatever it is people do rather than actually lift weights. Additionally, I will modify my form and range of motion on those assistance exercises to further compound the benefit derived therefrom, after, of course, a period of experimentation. The following are exercises I've found that help my deadlift of late. It is in no way a comprehensive list, nor any sort of a bible you should follow religiously, but it might give you some ideas.
In Order of Awesome...
Shrugs/ Rack Pulls. Anyone who's seen me in person will tell you that the first thing they notice, aside from my astonishingly smashed nose and scarred face, are my traps. The mountains on either side of my ears have risen to their current state of awesome by the rigorous and religious application of shrugs. I could not love a human baby as much as I love shrugs. As such, I've embarked upon a neck holocaust the likes of which the world will never see again. I do these as a combination rack pull from knee height and shrug to get in extra pulling work, and I use my exact deadlift stance and grip width. I always use straps on these, however, and pull double overhand. Before you scream "That's bullshit!", simmer the fuck down and consider the following:
I have tiny little rat claws for hands. Thus, I am not designed for hand strength competitions.
I have no interest in joining Diesel Crew nor any other hand strength specialist team.
I use Spud straps, which effectively make this a fat bar pull. This, in turn, improves my grip.
Powerlifting doesn't have a fucking grip event.
I've never failed a pull because of my grip.
If any of the above don’t apply to you, feel free to do shrugs without straps. I, however, do not see the benefit in drastically reducing my shrug weight and drastically increasing the possibility of a bicep tear for a dubious and marginal increase in my grip strength. Play the percentages and ignore the assholes who tell you otherwise. Any time you see someone decrying the use of straps on a heavy pull, it's jealousy motivating his comments. Make no fucking mistake about that.
Recommended rep range: 2-10. Singles are more for fun than anything else on traps, and anything over 10 is cardio. That said, I will do higher reps in my warmup sets as a goof, just to embarrass other guys in the gym with the fact that I can do 30 reps with weights they cannot get off the pins.
Form tips: The recent spate of form Nazi nonsense on the internet has me perplexed, as it’s people with no qualifications or authority of any kind critiquing the form of strangers who are generally stronger than them. In regards to shrugs, there is no “correct” form, as it’s not a competition lift. That stated, here are my recommendations:
Do both strict and “power” shrugs. The term “power” shrugs is a bit of an annoyance to me because shrugs should necessarily be powerful, but in this, I mean stiff-legged and shrugs with some body English. I think my shrugs have actually increased more since I switched to stiff-legged form, but I had to make the switch because I cannot fit any more weight onto the bar. There is certainly merit to using body English to move the weight, and even max singles where you just hold the weight for time will do more for you than high rep strict sets. Thus, mix it up.
Do static holds with weight you can’t actually shrug. You will never be sorer in your life. If you make this a competition between you and your friends, you’re guaranteed to get bigger and insanely sore, as well as to see one or more of you pass out altogether, which is always amusing.
Don’t roll your shoulders. It had to have been a bodybuilder who propagated the nonsense that rolling your shoulders is best practice. It’s not. Move your shoulders straight up and down.
Any movement of your shoulders past full downward extension is technically a shrug. This means any upward movement of your shoulders with a heavy weight in your hands will increase strength and size. I would not recommend a program of naught but micro-shrugs, but those tiny reps will eventually lead to impressive ones. Save them for the end of your workout, though.
Bent Row. I've done a wide array of bent over rows over the years, and recently have started doing what some would call a Pendlay row and what others will nitpick to death. I could care less what you fuckers call it, but this is the form I've found to be most beneficial for the deadlift. Pendlay didn’t invent them, and his take on the row is simply one of many. The rows with which he’s credited differ from what one would typically call a bent row for a couple of reasons:
They begin on the floor.
You attempt to maintain parallel posture to the floor (though a bit of body English is inevitable if you’re adhering to the next principle tenet of the lift).
The lift is done explosively. I generally bruise my sternum when I do these, as the point is to pull the bar as hard as possible from the floor into your sternum.
You pull to your sternum rather than your stomach.
You drop the bar to the ground rather than doing a controlled negative.
Recommended rep range: 1-5. I generally stick with triples, but there's something to be said for the occasional single.
Form tips: I take exactly the stance and grip width I'll use on deadlifts, and then I pull the bar like I'm trying to rip it through my solar plexus into my spine, and finish by essentially dropping it to the floor. In doing so, I use as little upper body motion as possible with the maximum weight I can handle. The key here is the following equation:
Violence + Heavy Weight = Awesome
I've found this has helped my pull from the floor tremendously, and I regard pretty much any weight on the deadlift under 600 with utter contempt since I've begun doing these on a regular basis. Bent rows are to Olympic lifters and powerlifters what Coco Austin is to both black and white men— beloved by all. They're also one of the mainstays of the much ballyhooed Coan/Phillippi program and a major part of what Ed Coan actually did when he trained for deadlifting, so they’re certainly worth doing.
Zercher Squats. Interestingly, this is one of Louie Simmons' pet lifts, and he's even built a harness with which to do these so his lifters with bicep tears can rock out with their cocks out (or if they're chicks, their baby cocks.) These definitely build upper back strength, in addition to beating on your abs they're trash cans in "Stomp." I do these out of the rack or off the pins, depending on my mood, and have taken to calling partial Zerchers off the pins "Tombstones." I guess due to the fact that they make me feel like I've going to fucking die, and because it mimics the action of ripping a tombstone out of the ground with your bare hands.
Recommended rep range: 1-4. I despise doing these for reps, mostly due to the fact that it's hard to breathe. By the end of a rep-alicious set, they're about as anaerobic as can be, because I'm definitely ready to pass the fuck out.
Form tips: This exercise couldn’t be much more simple. The full lift is done as a deadlift to the floor, whereupon you place the weight in your lap, hook your arms beneath it and then stand. I prefer doing them out of the rack, however, as I can handle more weight that way and have no immediate plans to compete in the USAWA (the only odd-lifts federation in the US and damned interesting to check out. Google them.) In any event, I take what amounts to a sumo stance after unracking it, then descent until my elbows touch my thighs, then ascend. I do not pad the bar, as it limits the amount of weight you can hold (it forces your arm to open up and reduces the amount of isometric force your bicep can generate.) Just suck it up and the pain will go away in a coupl
e of weeks. For rack Zerchers, try setting the pins at a variety of heights and do everything from bottom-position pulls (great for the start of your deadlift) to the lockout.
Stiff-Leg High Pull. I love these and do them every so often, although I think I started doing them based on a misunderstanding of an exercise description in an article I can no longer find. In any event, these definitely seem to transfer into a shitload of explosiveness off the floor, and they didn't hurt my knee when my patello-femoral tendonitis was acting like a bastard. As such, I hammered the fuck out of these for a while, to seemingly good effect. Like the aforementioned exercises, I used the same stance and grip width as my deadlift, then with more legs more or less straight pulled the bar as violently as I could, as high as I could. My goal here was to increase my break speed off the ground, in addition to strengthen my upper back to compensate for the end of my deadlift, when my shoulders round and my legs are nearly locked out.
Recommended rep range: 1-3.