Benanything's Training Log

Training Training Logs
217

[quote]Benanything wrote:
just looked through one of my first forum posts on T-Nation, pretty darn disappointed at myself. It’s been a year and my deadlift is pretty much still the same.

Don’t be disappointed in yourself. It happens. Instead, focus on fixing it.

Here are my suggestions:

  1. Cut yourself some slack. You’re a hard worker, but unfortunately you’re also a mean boss to yourself. Look through your posts, and I rather think you’ll find very frequent mentions of feeling sick, feeling tired, feeling crap, etc. That should tell you something. Deadlifts are taxing as @#$% and if you train feeling less than good a lot of the time, that’s probably the one lift guaranteed to suffer.

  2. Much as it will suck, drop your pulling load. Pull heavy (over 85%) at most once per fortnight and at that load never for more than a double. That doesn’t mean stop pulling, it just means the vast majority of your DL training should probably sit between 55% and 70% of your max. That’ll let you do three very important things: firstly, you’ll recover a ton better; secondly, you’ll be able to work on getting your technique just right; and thirdly, you’ll be able to work on speed.

For example, over a fortnight your deadlift training could look something like:

One day: 8x2@60%, less than a minute between sets. That’s a kind of dynamic effort approach. Add 5% every time you repeat it until you hit 70% and then go back to 60% but opposite stance. When you’ve done that, you’ll be six weeks in and could go and test for a new max or do another three week run from a deficit something.

At least three days no DL

One day: 3x5@70% competition stance, again adding 5% every week. Same as above, at 80% go back to 70% and pull opposite stance. You can set it up so you always do the opposite stance to day one. However, after six weeks I’d probably say don’t do deficits or anything but go 75% to 85% instead.

At least five days no DL

Third day
3 to 5 heavy singles at 85%, competition stance. Add 5% each week until 95% then drop back to 87.5% adding 5% until 98.5% then drop to 90% adding 5% until 100%.

That’d take care of 9 weeks, and as long as you didn’t run yourself into the ground on the other lifts I’d be surprised if you didn’t have a new PR by then.

Just my two cents.