Deadlift Starting Hip Position

Recently I’ve had Rob and Payton switch to sumo for the time being to test their strength on their opposite stance and see if we can handle higher training volumes. I wanted to highlight both of these lifters, because they both display the same characteristic on their conventional deadlifts, which at times led to excessive lower back or SI joint fatigue. Whereas with sumo, that issue is not present with them. If you scroll over to the conventional deadlift videos (CLICK HERE), you can see both Rob and Payton have a slight pelvic tuck as they pull in. If we are looking directionally, on conventional deadlift they tend to pull/tuck their hips into the bar, versus on sumo I would describe their movement more as pulling their feet and hips into the floor. While we want our hips as close to the bar as possible, we also want them far enough away too. That probably doesn’t make much sense at first, but we have to understand that every lifter has a certain genetic structure. In particular for a neutral back and pelvis to occur, the hips must me a certain distance from the bar. If our shoulder/shoulder blades are over the bar like they should be, and our torso is a certain length, the hips must be a certain effective length away from the bar to create a neutral back and pelvic position. If you scroll to the 5th and 6th picture, you can get more of an idea of what I mean. In the 5th picture, we have Payton with near perfect neutral position. If he was to bring his hips any closer to the bar, his lower back would have to flex and his pelvis would have to posteriorly rotate under. In the 6th picture, we can see this exact difference with Lorenzo. Typically what will happen when we tuck our hips too close to the bar is our strength off the floor will actually be stronger, but come lockout a lifter will get stuck about mid thigh. In that scenario, at lockout the lifter has already fully contracted their glutes and hamstrings and are just relying on lower back extension to finish their lockout, which is not optimal. And in Rob and Payton’s case, it was placing a higher amount of stress on their lower backs and SI joint.

So for Rob and Payton you may ask why we didn’t just fix that on their conventional deadlift? Well that is easier said than done, and they both tended to struggle with this concept on conventional deadlift. But as soon as they switched to sumo, this concept just naturally occurred without me having to cue a thing. This happened naturally because with sumo that effective distance will be less due to a more upright torso position. So for both Rob and Payton, they did not feel the need to tuck their pelvis under in the same way, as they already felt their hips being much closer to their center of gravity just from the positional change. Would I make this change for every lifter who struggles with this? Definitely not, and these two examples of stance change are much more the minority of what I would typically do. But in their cases it has currently provided the solution we needed, and now it is time to continue to progress their sumo deadlifts to see if this is a long term solution with matching or exceeding their conventional strength while being able to handle higher training volumes.

Home Gym Accessory Movements I Program Most Often

With gym shutdowns nationwide, home gyms have had a meteoric rise. And while those who have access to a barbell, rack, bench, and plates right now are feeling very fortunate to continue their training, the one downside of most home gyms is the limited variety of accessory movements. Lacking dumbbells and machines limits a lot of what people normally do for their upper and lower body accessory work, but most would be surprised by how much you can still get done with just barbell. To give some ideas, I wanted to put together a breakdown of the 9 accessory movements I have found myself programming most often for my athlete’s home gym workouts. I’d also recommend searching “barbell landmine variations” on Google to open yourself up to even more ideas. But looking at bang for your buck, these are the 9 movements I think most will find very beneficial. (CLICK HERE for videos)

1.) Inverted Barbell Hamstring Curls are a movement I like year round, but are fairly unknown to the general population. And within a home gym setting you have even less options for leg curls accessories, so these move up my totem pole of importance even more. Like many of these other bodyweight movements, we can make adjustments with our body angle to regress or progress the difficulty of this movement. Most lifters will find it plenty difficult with their feet on the floor, but you can also elevate your feet 12-18 inches to make it even harder. The biggest key though on Inverted Barbell Hamstring Curls is to fight the eccentric, so I always program these with a 3-0-0 tempo to notate that the eccentric motion should be under control at all times.

2.) Zercher squats provide a great alternative to Goblet squats and other lower body accessories in the absence of dumbbells. A big benefit of Zercher squats is there are many different variations of this movement that can be performed. For those who have done Zercher squats before, you probably know the limiting factor tends to be your core and is a very common accessory movement I program for Strongman competitors to mimic stone loading. But for powerlifters, providing some heel elevation by placing your heels on a 45lb. plate can change the leverages to better target your quads. This allows you to stay more upright and bias towards greater degrees of knee flexion. The Zercher position could also be carried over to other exercises like lunges or split squats.

3.) Meadows Rows acts as a great substitute for single arm dumbbell or machine rows. It may be a bit less optimal to be gripping the end of the collar versus a dumbbell, but for alternatives within a home gym, its hard to beat Meadows Rows for a back accessory. It is very easy to set up, load, and perform while allowing the ability to work through low to high rep ranges.

4.) Outside of Barbell Bench Press and Dips, its tough to find horizontal pressing accessories within a home gym. My personal go to is Barbell Pushups. The issue with regular pushups is we tend to cut range of motion due to the proximity of our face to the floor, so slightly elevating a barbell and lowering our chest to the bar creates a higher degree of difficulty. For most you will need to add further difficulty to this movement, so options to do so include elevating your feet, adding a tempo, and placing weight on your upper back if possible.

5.) Reverse Lunges is already one of my favorite lower body accessory movements, but I do prefer them performed with dumbbells. But with home gyms and limited access, Reverse Lunges can still be a great exercise used with a barbell. The issue I find with a barbell is most people tend to want to extend more at the low back, so just be very mindful of your bracing while performing these.

6.) Pull-ups are the typical home gym bodyweight back accessory movement, but often overlooked is Inverted Barbell Rows. These offer a great way to train the horizontal pulling motion with low stress on the lower back. A great benefit too is this movement has a wide degree of regression and progression based on changing your body angle. Most powerlifters will tend to need to invert though, placing their feet on a bench to create adequate difficulty. And if needed, I will also add a tempo to increase difficulty even further. 

7.) I program Pendlay Rows fairly often, but find myself doing so even more frequently now with the gym shutdowns. I personally am not a big fan of barbell rows due to the low back involvement and the tendency for people to cheat on them. So for this reason, my go to barbell row variation is Pendlay Rows. The key with these is being strict and limiting the use of “body english” to perform the movement. When done right, it doesn’t take much weight to make Pendlay Rows fairly challenging.

8.) Half Kneel Landmine Presses are another great substitute for pressing work in the absence of dumbbells. I promote the half kneel position as it take out the use of the legs to get momentum. With the Half Kneel Landmine Press, there are also a variety of angles you can perform these at to target the pressing muscles differently. For the purpose I have been programming them, I like to keep a vertical torso angle so that the press angle mimics an incline press. If you’d like to use this as more of a direct shoulder work accessory, Eric Cressey has a great breakdown of these on his YouTube channel. He promotes a slight forward torso lean as you press to achieve a finishing position that would be directly overhead.

9.) While Larsen Presses are not quite an accessory movement, but more so a variation, I did want to touch on the the reasoning why I am programming these more than ever. Many people are stuck with crappy benches that are far from the normal IPF spec competition benches they are used to. This makes it very difficult to replicate the same setup and positioning you’d typically be able to achieve on bench press. So instead of having my lifters try to struggle through this, I am programming more Larsen Pressing to remove the factor of the bench. While bench width still does play a role on Larsen Presses, it does remove the bench height variable which is where most lifter’s issues are arising. I find more consistent training pushing Larsen Presses at this time since the position and form they can achieve in their home gyms can still closely mimic what they’d be doing at their normal gym.

How To Program After An Extended Break From Training – CLICK HERE

With the current crisis, many people may be going 2-3 months without touching a barbell. So how do you program for powerlifting after coming back from a hiatus in training? In my latest YouTube video using Dan as an example, who took 6 months off powerlifting last year, I detail exactly how we structured his training to get him back near full strength within 5-6 weeks. In these videos (CLICK HERE), you can see the comparison of his week 1 pause squat set of 275×3 versus week 5 where he hit 350lbs. for 3 reps! I show the full breakdown of his training with the sets, exercise selection, and volume progression we used to get these results. And at the end, I give a general structure for anyone to use with the percentage of volume to start with for each lift and then the increases each week. Click the link above to watch!

When and How To Adjust Your Training Max

A big thing I’ve learned through experience as a coach, and am still continuing to learn, is when and how to adjust a lifter’s training max. What seems to be the simple answer is to set their training max at whatever their best 1RM squat, bench press, and deadlift is, but that tends to be a fallacy. Most likely your current PRs were performed within a meet or on days where you were feeling very strong. As a powerlifter, you know those days where you are feeling stronger than ever are few and far between. So if the majority of your training is not under those same conditions, then basing your percentages off a number you cannot hit on a regular basis is going to lead to some issues. I included the comparison videos above of Payton I. (CLICK HERE) as he is a lifter that we very much see a distinct difference between numbers he can hit in training versus in a meet. Side by side are a 590lb. squat in the gym versus his 2nd attempt of 584lbs. at the Arnold. His current best gym squat is 590lbs., which was a bit of a grinder and probably a touch high, but his best meet squat was 606lbs. with probably another 10lbs. or so left in the tank. If I was to program Payton’s squat off of his current meet PR, that would be 3% higher than anything he’s been able to do in training. And while 3% seems small, thats the equivalent of 1 rep. So if I used his meet PR for his training max, everything I program for him would be 1 rep harder than it should be. I made the mistake multiple times of adjusting lifter’s training maxes post-meet to what they hit on the platform, and time and time again saw them getting crushed by these new numbers. After learning from my mistakes, what do I do instead? Here is a detailed breakdown of my general strategies for when and how I adjust an athlete’s training max.

1.) The first thing I take in consideration when choosing training maxes for an athlete is what I believe their baseline strength is. What this means is that even on a bad day they should be able to hit “X” number. But at the same time, I don’t want to only plan for bad days, I want to plan for the average strength level of where the majority of their training will take place. Fact is there are some training days where athletes will outperform the assigned percentages, and some days they will under perform, so as a coach I want to find that happy medium. So using Payton as an example, his top end strength looks to be somewhere around 610-615lbs. and his best gym lift is 590lbs. I am taking into consideration that I know there have been days Payton can hit more in the gym than 590lbs., as on that specific day he hit 590lbs. he was under very high fatigue. So as his training max, we will go right between the two numbers and set his squat at 600lbs. That is a number that I believe is repeatable within the gym, and I am also factoring in that Payton tends to perform very well on rep sets versus singles, so programming his training max too low will make those sets too easy. And since Payton is a fairly experienced lifter, we may not adjust this training max for months on end, unless we see specific evidence otherwise, which I will touch on later.

2.) Payton C. just started lifting 2 years ago, and he’s still experiencing those “newbie” gains. It seems like every other month he’s hitting some new massive PR on each lift, but I do not immediately adjust his training max to match that, and there are two main reasons for that. First is due to the principle of acute/chronic workload ratio (ACWR). In short, ACWR states that any training workload that is 10% more or less than the 4 week trailing average shows an increased likelihood for injury. About 6 months ago Payton hit a new PR squat of 485lbs. in a training block where his training max was set at 440lbs. If I had immediately increased his training max to 485lbs. it would have jumped his training volume by 9.9%, or just right at that upper limit for ACWR, and would have put him at a higher risk of injury. Rather I decided to split that in the middle and set his training max at 460lbs., which increased total volume by 4.3%. This then leads to the second point, which is that the 4.3% increase and new training max of 460lbs. was an increased stimulus in training over anything Payton has done. For a new lifter who has years ahead of him to make progress and increase his training workload, I’d rather eek out every bit of strength we can from less total work. Too often people just want to throw more and more volume and frequency on the table thinking they will get faster stronger. But more likely, they will get injured sooner and stall out, as we saw with many Junior lifters from 2015-2018. Recently though I think an influx in good coaches have helped to curtail that issue and we are seeing more manageable progress and training adjustments with these Junior lifters than we saw before. With Payton, over the next 5 training blocks I slowly increased that training max by an average of 5lbs. each block until we finally caught up to 485lbs. But now at this point, I am fairly confident if Payton retested his max, it would be over 500lbs., so as long as his “newbie” gains continue, we most likely will be playing catch up with his training max for a while.

3.) Everything I’ve stated so far has been directed towards percentage based programming, but RPE is an excellent tool to make these weekly training max adjustments based on how the lifter feels each day. But not everyone should or will train based off of RPE, so its important to understand when and how to adjust training maxes when the majority of the workload is percentage based. With that, RPE is still a great tool within percentage based programs. With Payton C., even though his program is percentage based, I still have him rate his RPE to track progress. If you search ” RPE percentage chart” on Google, you will see exactly how we can translate his RPE ratings to be used to calculate his 1RM. After he hit that 485lb. PR squat, we needed to see proof over the next couple blocks that the strength he displayed on that PR was repeatable before continuing to increase his training max. The training block after his average projected max on his top single squats based of his RPE ratings was 479lbs. So while it showed it was higher than the 460lb. training max, he had yet to show that 485lbs. was repeatable on a weekly basis. Fast forward 2 blocks later, and that average increased to 483lbs., and then 1 block after that it increased to 500lbs., which is then when I bumped his training max up to 485lbs. finally.

4.) For someone like Payton I. who is more experienced and seeing slower progress, more than likely we are going to be training at a truer training max throughout the year. So with that, we are less likely to make adjustments to his training max block to block. For Payton, we do use RPE top sets to account for this so that we can auto regulate and test his strength on a regular basis to allow him to outperform his training max if the strength is there. But if we did full percentage based training, we could still use the tactic above of rating the RPE of his sets to track progress. Unlike Payton C. though, I will probably need to see multiple training blocks of sustained increase with Payton I. before making adjustments. For example, let’s say for 2 training blocks in a row we see continually that he is averaging a projected max of 610lbs. The next training block I will raise his training max to 605lbs. to split the difference in half, and then if he continues for 1 more training block averaging 610lbs. or more, I will then adjust up another 5lbs. to eventually match the 610lbs. projected 1RM he has been averaging. 5lbs. may not seem like much, but it is around 1% increase in training volume. At high levels of lifting, 1% increases add up over time. If we increase his training max 3 times within a year by 5lbs. each time, thats about a 10% increase in workload within 3 years, for someone who is already handling a very high level of training volume. If we said the same about Payton’s total, and he increased his max by 3% each year, within 3 years he’d go from totaling 1664lbs. to 1813lbs. at 93kg. While a 1% increase in training volume isn’t going to correlate exactly with a 1% increase in total, when you can see those bigger numbers, it makes sense how 1% increases can add up over time.

5.) Life stress also plays a role in when and how I will adjust someone’s training max. Since Payton C.’s training max tends to be fairly sub-maximal right now, rarely do we have a day that just goes badly and he cannot perform the assigned weights. Whereas with Payton I., we have found that fluctuations in his work schedule can make a profound difference, especially since he is training at a more true training max. So based on multiple life factors, we may adjust his training max during certain times of the year to account for his baseline strength fluctuating. This most likely will not be a drastic change, but maybe we drop his training max on squat by 10lbs. during a block where we know work stress is going to be high. Those high stress times is also when RPE based training can be very useful to allow for a lifter to regulate during each training session. In my recent YouTube video, I discussed how the two athletes I have that have fully auto-regulated RPE programs are both lifters who have high life stress and large fluctuations in strength. As a coach, it would be near impossible for me to optimize a program for them based off of percentages alone. So when we see lifters who fluctuate a lot during certain times of the year, maybe during those periods we transition to more RPE based work rather than percentage based.

Setup and Bracing Guide For Low Bar Squatting – CLICK HERE

I’ve made a couple posts detailing the low bar squat setup and bracing, but never a full guide that breaks down each step all together. So in my latest YouTube video, I go through the step my step process of setting the upper back, breathing, bracing, and maintaining tightness by developing the optimal setup, prior to descending. If done correctly, much of the stereotypical cues are unneeded, as the bracing and tightness you create help to naturally take care of your upper/lower back and pelvic positions for you. And for those who may not fully understand what bracing is and what we are trying to accomplish, I even made “torso” out of a ballon and duck tape to mimic what our lunges and torso are doing as we inhale and brace. Click the link above to watch, and let me know of any questions you have!