Yep, definitely wasn’t around for that. Damn.
I mean, five years ago I would have agreed without question. Now, I’ll qualify a couple of things that I think about front squats as a deadlift driver.
First off, if you’re going to front squat to drive your deadlift do it paused and relatively heavy immediately AFTER deadlifting. As a result, it won’t be somenthing you can do for more than a few weeks. It’s something of a blunt instrument.
Second, my experience is that front squats work as a deadlift driver when your deadlift is weaker. Once you hit around 500 lbs, front squats seem to become much less effective. Now, I suspect this is because at this point, the load you would need to front squat - paused, ideally - is higher than what your upper back can hold, so you become limited by your upper back strength.
This is where the SSB can be used. Because the bar sits on your back, your upper back no longer limits the weight you can use. Instead, if you use a load greater than what your upper back can stabilise you simply have your upper back folded over. So what you can do (which in no way means you SHOULD do it) is swap front squats for the SSB. Because the SSB allows you to use much more weight, you don’t pause it and instead do moderate (5-10) reps and load accordingly. You keep your stance narrower, and as a result your back from crack to neck is placed under significant stress and adapts. The problem is that to do this safely, you must be able to brace effectively under fatigue or you run the risk of failing to stabilise your spine.
So long story short, once you are looking at a 500+ lbs pull, squatting variations that target the back may be less advisable than directly targeting the lower back and abs.
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Keep in mind, ActivitiesGuy was mid-600s deadlifting and tried a squatting approach to up his deads. Ended up hurting more and resetting back down to 400s for quite some time. I wanna relearn how to squat because I think it puts great size on someone’s frame, but I don’t think squats add to people’s deadlifts. Especially not conventional deadlifts.
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This was super informative. Thanks for writing all that out!
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I’m liking this more and more! I do squat pretty upright but that’s for my hip’s sake, not my back.
I missed that, but he’s still squatting a respectable weight when he throws it in the mix.
Honestly, I’m looking at my past to plan my future training. I did ______ and this is what I achieved. I recently achieved less than that so I should probably go back to _______.
I still can’t say The Daily Dose failed me. I went from 485 being glued to the ground to successfully pulling 475 and breaking 515 from the floor.
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I think the daily dose was great for you, but there’s no actual peak, so going for over 500 and failing after only handling low 300s for a month doesn’t mean you’re not strong enough, it means you just weren’t used to handling the weight.
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Pretty much. To build your deadlift, you have to deadlift in some form regularly. Adding squatting into that mix will definitely help, but only if the mix contains deadlifts.
First things first, that’s an awesome truck J, that looks so cool, congratulations and it sounds like a bargain.
You did SGSS at a point in time where your body was used to handling heavy weights for reps as I recall it.
As you said you have been handling less weight and haven’t really gone balls to the walls for quite some time.
Getting right into SGSS with the 8 reps that really sucks, is a hard job. Keep at it, only a little bit left, then thinks gets a bit easier, your body has adapted and you’ll end up getting a big deadlift. Take 10% weight of squat, focus on driving with the quads and doing them beautifully, leaving 3 reps in the tank on the final set.
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I think Tom Platz would say that they work pretty well.
Thanks, Mort!
The first time I ran SGSS was immediately after hip surgery so I was in the same situation. I might have taken a longer break from squatting this time. That’s my only guess as to why I hate them so much.
My mindset towards training has undergone some changes over the past couple years. I used to be proud of training my legs, but now I only want to do what’s necessary for my goals. Part of me wishes I was good at squats, but I’m hating them right now. And that starts the internal conversation of why I’m doing them.
I might be past the point of doing unpleasant things for the sake of doing them. I train because I want to and I enjoy it. If that starts to change then I think I need to reconsider what I’m doing. That’s where I’m at with things right now. The trick is identifying if this is a short term bump in the road or a true shift in my training.
I’m through two weeks of the leg sessions of SGSS. I have two sessions of 8s remaining and then it’s on to 5s which are much more tolerable.
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Really, right after hip surgery. Dang J I was sure you did something before, so you where more used to it.
Well can’t remember all that has happened in your log.
And yes two sessions of madness, I remember the 8’s week as particular unpleasant.
I started SGSS about two weeks after the doctor released me to train fully. I just looked back and I started week one with 205 on squats. That’s the same weight I used in week one this time, too, but I’m thinking it was too heavy. I’m not sure how 225 is going to feel for week three.
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Skipped over the truck before.
Sweet ride, dude. Doing some housework today and really could use a different car than my corolla 
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My 2c: and don’t hate me for this, is that you were expecting too much of a massive increase in the short spell of time you ran daily dose. You got pretty good gains out of it, for a 6ish week program.
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You are correct. I was expecting to make the same progress I made with SGSS after hip surgery. I think the major difference was that I trained up til the day I had surgery. I was out for 12 weeks.
With the combination of my hip acting up and my shoulder surgery, I laid off deadlifts for 8 months or more. My brain just compared one injury recovery to the other. It was wrong.
But, I’m starting SGSS from a better place this time. Maybe it’ll work out better. And if it doesn’t then I’ll blame it on not doing the full leg workouts (supposed to be doing 3x8 and 5x8 on everything - deads, squats, RDLs, and RFESS or lunges).
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3.8.20 SGSS W2 D5 Push
WARM UP
Jog 3 laps + 1 lap of the dynamic stuff
INCLINE
140 x 10 x 4
DB BENCH
55 x 10 x 4
Ran into my wife’s cousin and chatted way too long.
MACHINE FLY
150 x 10 x 4
DB REAR DELT FLY
35 x 15, 15
35 x 12 + 20 x 12
6 WAY RAISE
10s x 10, 7, 5.5
Immediately into
DB LAT RAISE
20 x 12
SKULL CRUSHER
70 x 17, 11, 8
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If I remember correctly, isn’t SGSS a 16 week program?
I can definitely sympathise with the frustration though. I definitely assumed my strength levels would return pretty quickly after restarting training and I’ve been fairly wrong so far.
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It’s 12 and The Daily Dose took about 9 weeks.
I finished my weekend with a bloat. I crushed meal prep by slow cooking enough chicken to last the week. I cut up and baked 6 lbs of red potatoes. I also made hamburger patties (actually, deer with a bit of pork sausage), but I couldn’t grill them because the wind was blowing 40 mph and we’re under a red flag warning. I don’t think the charcoal would’ve lit.
Dinner was at Braums for my nephew’s 13th birthday. I has a double cheeseburger with fries and chased it with a banana split. I subbed two scoops of chocolate chip cookie dough and one scoop of peanut butter cup ice cream for the regular stuff. It was glorious.
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I’ll chime in about dreading squats with my own experience.
I recently turned 42. As a younger 30-something, 8-15 rep squat sets felt great and worked well for my body. By my upper-30s though, things had shifted. Two leg workouts a week still felt great, but high-rep squats burned me out after a month.
Enter a Dan John article about cluster sets. DJ wrote about lower frequency and lower rep training and, while reading it, something clicked. I did a modified version of the program for a couple months and had amazing strength gains. I then skipped deloading, got sick, and drifted away from the program and its effective principles. Real smart, Zack 
These days, I’ve learned through trial and lots of error that 1) two leg sessions per week is optimal for me; 2) I need far less volume and lift variety for gains than my teenage bodybuilding self believed; 3) low-rep squats, like 8 sets of 2 reps, don’t overtax my joints or recovery but still strengthen me; 4) I burn out of any give rep range after 6-8 weeks; and 5) when I’ve gone from anticipation to dread about any given lift, that’s my body letting me know it’s time for a change.
I dunno if these observations will be helpful for you, but I hope so.
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Thanks for sharing. I can’t say my body is ready for a change because I’ve just barely started up again. I’d like to think it’s the psychological side of training. I suck at the lift so I naturally don’t want to do it.
I find myself wondering if I’ve hit that mythical point in my time where suddenly my body fights back and everything is harder. I feel like my weights on some other lifts are lighter than they used to be and getting back to the old weights is proving to be difficult.
Regardless of the why, I just have to keep going. I’m 80% certain I’m going to keep pressing on with squats. They other 20% of me likes the idea of single leg work (not really) and leg press because I can hammer my legs without taxing my back. I could save my back for all my pulling work (ya know, the stuff I enjoy).
We’ll see how this week goes. I need to get through tomorrow’s and Friday’s session and then I get to drop down to 5s.
I didn’t mind the Training Maximally approach of using sets of 3-5 to build up to my TM and hitting that for a single. Maybe there’s room to do that for squats and continue with SGSS for deads…? It would probably be better than doing no squats at all.
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