Weird Strength Ideas

Training Powerlifting
21

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
Scrotus wrote:
Synthetickiller wrote:
matso1236 wrote:
zephead4747 wrote:

-defecit deadlifts, with chains so you still lockout with challenging weight

That sounds extremely interesting…

And REALLY dangerous…

elaborate please, exactly what makes it really dangerous?

Most strength athletes don’t practice lowering the bar slowly for deadlift. I know I don’t. I think trying to slowly lower an above maximal deadlift just seems to put a huge amount of stress on the lower back. Just thinking about it, that’s really an insane load just to set down.

As well, walking out of a rack w/ that kinda weight is not easy, and seems like a lot of energy will be spent doing that. Just sounds like too much of a hassle and danger to provide any huge gains. I’d think banded deadlifts or deads w/ chains would help lockout just as much.

Have any of you guys tried it? I’d like to actually hear some first impressions on doing this sort of lift before doing it myself. [/quote]

I am in week 3 of Thib’s Beast Building Program and he prescribes negative DL after a set of rack lockouts. I fucking love them. I do 110% negatives and they , I feel, have helped me alot.

I really don’t feel the tension/strain on my lower back as long as I stay tight. There are a lot of “DIFFERENT” strength ideas in the program. I suggest anyone read if they are stuck in any area.

edit
I’m in part one of the program.

22

IF you are doing speed pulls w/ bands from a deficit, I would warn you NOT to do them for 8 weeks straight. I think in general, your body will adapt to pulling a weight that is light on the floor and heavy at the top. Its great to run it for 2 or 3 weeks max…

After that, you just adapt and your bottom end sucks. I found it good to add in once every 4 weeks or so to shock your body. Probably twice every 6 weeks.

You should always include heavy pulling, either from a deficit or just good ol’ deadlifting. Maybe run them on week 3 and 6 or something. I’ve found it to be a great exercise, but at the same time, very detrimental if its your only deadlift movement.

I know its hard to add things into certain programs. If you can, great, if not, I don’t know.

23

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
IF you are doing speed pulls w/ bands from a deficit, I would warn you NOT to do them for 8 weeks straight. I think in general, your body will adapt to pulling a weight that is light on the floor and heavy at the top. Its great to run it for 2 or 3 weeks max…

After that, you just adapt and your bottom end sucks. I found it good to add in once every 4 weeks or so to shock your body. Probably twice every 6 weeks. You should always include heavy pulling, either from a deficit or just good ol’ deadlifting.

Maybe run them on week 3 and 6 or something. I’ve found it to be a great exercise, but at the same time, very detrimental if its your only deadlift movement.

I know its hard to add things into certain programs. If you can, great, if not, I don’t know. [/quote]

not speed pulls, I’m using them as a ME deadlift lift. I’m pretty much still pretty newbish so I was pretty sure I was ok deadlifting every week.

I do:
monday:
coan DL

Tuesday:
bench

Thursday:
squat

-friday will be DE bench day when I feel my shoulder is at 100%

-After coan DL I’m switching squat and dl days back around.

24

I don’t recall coan’s cycle off hand.

I used to use banded deads from a deficit as ME work (when I was doing westside). I found that pulling like that too often only helped in that specific case: light weight & tons of tension or chains.

I deadlift 3 out of 4 times a cycle. My cycles are 4 weeks long, BUT I have a back injury and I take a week off before going heavy…

My point is that I deadlift every week and I find that doing this movement is just TOO specific in that you’ll adapt too much to it and improve your lockout, but at the expense of pulling off the floor. That’s my experience.

If you are using that movement as your ME work every week, you might run into the same problem I had. You might not as well, but I think w/o pulling straight weight a few times, you’ll have some issues…

25

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
I don’t recall coan’s cycle off hand.

I used to use banded deads from a deficit as ME work (when I was doing westside). I found that pulling like that too often only helped in that specific case: light weight & tons of tension or chains.

I deadlift 3 out of 4 times a cycle. My cycles are 4 weeks long, BUT I have a back injury and I take a week off before going heavy…

My point is that I deadlift every week and I find that doing this movement is just TOO specific in that you’ll adapt too much to it and improve your lockout, but at the expense of pulling off the floor. That’s my experience.

If you are using that movement as your ME work every week, you might run into the same problem I had. You might not as well, but I think w/o pulling straight weight a few times, you’ll have some issues…[/quote]

alright. I’ll have to consider that.

26

[quote]zephead4747 wrote:

does anyone else have random ideas they’d like to share?[/quote]

According to a Louie Simmons article I read, Westside have been playing around with kettlebells instead of chains - a dead weight added part-way through the lift.

Strikes me you could do a deficit DL with the additional weight set to be lifted at your normal bottom position, thus pulling more than usual at the bottom position but using those extra inches to attack it with speed.

Not sure if it would help any, but it would sure make you feel like you did something cool that day.

27

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
IF you are doing speed pulls w/ bands from a deficit, I would warn you NOT to do them for 8 weeks straight. I think in general, your body will adapt to pulling a weight that is light on the floor and heavy at the top. Its great to run it for 2 or 3 weeks max…
[/quote]

the force should be the same if you are excellerating off the floor. You can create the same force as a heavy lift if you excellerate the lighter weight. Personally, I think this is the biggest benefit to bands. It really teaches you to excellerate out of the hole.

Do you think cycling band tension would help eliminate adeptation?

I am trying a little experiment. I am cycling band tension on DL, Squat, and Bench. I’ll use DL as an example. This is my worste lift by far as I just started doing them. I can DL 425lbs and it is very slow. Lower weight are slow as well.

For the first week of the cycle I used my heaviest bands and 295lbs of bar weight. This equals 320lbs at the bottom and 455lbs at the top. For the rest of cycle I am going to decrease band tension while increasing bar weight.

The goal is to keep the weight at the top 455lbs while gradually increasing the weight at the bottom until I do 455lbs with no band tension. I also rotate this with Squat every other lower body day. So it looks something like this:

295 + Strong Bands = 320/455
315 + Average Bands = 335/455
325 + Light Bands = 340/455
365 + Monster Minis = 375/455
425 + Mini Bans = 425/455
455 Straight weight.

I do all of this from a jump stretch platform with 12" bands. I only do singles but will do multiple sets if it is not a max effort on DL. DLing with bands is a bitch so I am not too worried about the big jumps in weight at the bottom as lighter band tension should make up for it.

I have no idea if this will work but it’s fun trying new things. If it works and I can hit 455lbs in 10 weeks I’ll do the same with 495 at the top.

If nothing else it should help me find my natural strength curve on each lift. ie a ratio of bottom to top weight that provides a lift that feels like I could fail at any point in the lift or the whole lift feels like a sticking point. Using this ratio in other progressions should provide for good results assuming the ratio doesn’t change.

Anyway, just my hairbrained sceme.

28

I have pulled 470 and I can say that you will not be using strong, average or even light bands. The tension on the JS platform is way too much. Mini’s are a LOT. I can’t crack 200 off the floor w/ light bands.

Maybe using a lot of chain too and remove it and add weight as you progress?

Maybe 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off? Straight weight, bands.

I think you can do your set up w/ squat, but deadlift is another animal. Feel free to try it, but I would think your lower end would suffer from lack of straight weight. There’s something about straight weight that can’t be replaced.

Like I’ve said, it can really help. You can use it as a secondary lift or cycle it, but you might have some real issues w/ cracking weight off the floor in 8 weeks.

You can be a Guinea Pig if you want. I’m just basing this from my own experiences. You can’t replace regular lifts with ones like these all the time, you become too specialized.

One other thing, whatever you do, do heavy ab work every week. It’ll help a lot.

29

Dont know where I saw this but theres a method people used to swear by back in the day. I read about it being used for the bench.

basically you get a weight 10-15 kg more than your max, unrack it an just hold it until your arms shake like crazy and you cant hold any longer than rack it again. 4-5 sets is probably enough.

Dont know the exact reasoning behind it but I imagine it is just a shock technique to get your body used to feeling that weigh

30

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
I have pulled 470 and I can say that you will not be using strong, average or even light bands. The tension on the JS platform is way too much. Mini’s are a LOT. I can’t crack 200 off the floor w/ light bands.
[/quote]

I have the 12" bands from Ironwoody. I’ve already used the strongs on DL. It is a bitch. The bands were measured at the following for DL:

Bot/top
mini - 5/30
Mmini - 10/90
Light - 15/130
Aver - 20/140
Strong - 25/160

This is for 2 bands. The Ironwoody ones are little strange and some of the pair are a little different in lenght.

Your probably right.

I do appreciat the input. I probably will try it and see what happens. If I’ve improved significantly when I get down to straight weight, I’ll keep doing it. If not, I’ll go back to a more convensional approach. I am probably as skeptical as you but I’m going to try it anyway.

I’ve been doing weighted incline situps. I hook my feet under the pad that you normally put your knees over so that I can keep my legs straight and hit the lower abs hard. I also do standing crunches with my lat PD machine. Reps are usually in the 3 to 8 range.

31

[quote]zephead4747 wrote:
-Any reason to add chains to the floor press as a raw bencher?
[/quote]

well, I did them for six weeks… 90kg of chains (at the top), between 105-115kg of bar weight…

I did them for total number of reps, between 15-20… so number of sets didnt mattered, either 15 singles, 8 doubles, or 3x3, 2x2, 5 singles… I kept the rest periods constant and just hit the weight staying one rep short from failure so I dont have too much of a drop on next set…

well, they didnt do much for my RAW bench press… as far as increasing my 1RM, and it fact it even fell down a little bit…

if your lockout is weak point (which is rare case for raw bencher), I suppose you can do them… and get something out of it…

otherwise for RAW benches, I think there are better exercises, and I dont think chains are necessary for RAW bencher, altough using them from time to time can maybe help… they’re not maybe the best choice…

at least for me… altough my floor press numbers went up, my bench stayed the same… but I dont really care about floor press PRs… unless it has carryover to my BP…

my sticking point for RAW benching is excatly the bottom, if I move it one inch of the chest, I know I got the lift…

I havent did shirted benching in a while, but the way they work, floor presses with chains, I figured out that I can give them another shot on my equipped cycle, when I would prepare and try to raise my shirted max…

anyway, for me chains on almost any exercise dont really do much, except on pulling stuff where I got some results… my sticking points are at the bottom for my RAW lifts… if I get it moving up, I get the lift…

so maybe, I’m not a good example…

gavra

32

Altough I have to add, I have a pretty lanky training partner, 2 meters tall, about 300 pounds… long arms, was really “not so good” bencher… we did this together…

and floor presses with chains did wonders for him, his RAW max improved, his shirted max almost instantly improved, his floor press skyrocketed and bench maxes followed…

and I’m on shorter side, 5’10", with really short upper arms (forearm is of “normal” length)…

so maybe this has something to do with it… for his long stroke… they helped, for my short one, they didnt…

just remembered that this maybe should also be added into consideration…

gavra

33

dhickey,

Oblique raises on a 45 degree hyper. Hold the DB to your chest and do sets of 10. At my strongest, I was working up to 100 lbs @ 156 lbs body weight. You can really build a solid core w/ this exercise. Its something that you might wanna consider.

34

[quote]Synthetickiller wrote:
dhickey,

Oblique raises on a 45 degree hyper. Hold the DB to your chest and do sets of 10. At my strongest, I was working up to 100 lbs @ 156 lbs body weight. You can really build a solid core w/ this exercise. Its something that you might wanna consider.[/quote]

Thanks for the suggestion. Is this different than a really hight incline on an incline su bench? I don’t have a 45deg hyper. I really don’t have any room for more gear until my weight room (addition) is done later this summer.

Maybe I’ll try it from my flat hyper if I can secure it somehow. It’s kind of a piece of shit and wants to come off the floor when I do back raises with more than 30lbs.