Over the past few months, my deadlift has been sucking more and more. I used to be able to pull a set of 20 at 255, a set of 15 at 295, and 3 sets of 10 at 325 and still have gas in the tank for rack pulls and other lifts, but lately I’m just chugging when I get into those sets of 10.
I have a couple theories here:
I shouldn’t do deadlifts and rack pulls in the same day.
Something about my form has decayed and I’m not pulling correctly.
My strength is doing weird shit because I’m cutting and I need to stop worrying about it.
I’m not eating enough before deadlift days - keeping in mind that I do fasted intervals about 4-5 hours before deadlift days, but I eat 300kcals of oatmeal and 3 eggs right afterwards and have 2 more meals before deadlifting.
Diet is a VLCD, cutting since July '09 (60lbs of fat gone so far), I use SWF before lifting.
What do you guys think? Could it be something above or something I’m not thinking of?
VLCD? Very Low Calorie Diet? Wikipedia says that it is defined, medically, as “… a diet of 800 kilocalories per day …” I’m curious, just how little are you eating? Were (are) you obese? 60 lbs is a lot of weight to lose.
And just to directly answer your question, it’s almost certainly #3. If you’re losing weight, expect your strength to decrease.
[quote]goochadamg wrote:
VLCD? Very Low Calorie Diet? Wikipedia says that it is defined, medically, as “… a diet of 800 kilocalories per day …” I’m curious, just how little are you eating? Were (are) you obese? 60 lbs is a lot of weight to lose.
And just to directly answer your question, it’s almost certainly #3. If you’re losing weight, expect your strength to decrease.[/quote]
VLCD = Very Low Carbohydrate Diet, as coined by Shelby Starnes. I consume fewer than 50g carbs a day, not counting SWF or post-conditioning oatmeal if I’m going to lift later that day. I regularly eat 2400 kcals a day.
I used to be 272 lbs, I now weigh in at 223 lbs. My university has a rather high-end bio-electrical-impedance thingy that’s free for students so that kinesiology students can learn about that stuff hand-on. I get one done about every other week, and it has shown that I’ve apparently added muscle over these last 8 months. Progress pics seem to confirm this; my chest, lats, and hamstrings have gotten much larger. Or maybe they’re just no longer buried underneath a mountain of fat.
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Are you doing this for conditioning or something?
To answer your question… Probably the fact that you’re cutting and/or compromising your recovery in some other way.
And the fact that you have the strangest deadlift routine ever, but to each his own.
[/quote]
No, it’s all for fat loss.
I thought the deadlift routine I use was strange too, but I get regular training from a guy here in Oklahoma that has put damn near every state NPC champion on stage in the last 20 years. I think he knows a thing or two more than I do, so I just ran with it.
A high volume deadlifting program on a low calorie diet just sounds like a bad move IMO. You impede recovery and are asking the body to use my fuel than it has alotted.
If it’s for fat loss there are safer was to condition than high volume deadlifting. Save something like deadlifts for maintain muscle and strength not for calorie burning.
Normally I’d say #3, but I know some people who’ve made massive gains in strength while losing fat with Shelby.
It’s most likely your routine- 20, 15 and 3x10 for deadlifts is a lot of volume for someone trying to move up in weight let alone lose it. Volume tolerance and high reps will drop on a caloric deficit.