Thursday 23 September 2010

Lighter Weight, Better Form on Deadlift (Video Update)

Location: Woodcock Sports Centre, Aston University
Day:6.50 - Thursday - 23rd September

Chin Ups (3 x 5 weighted @15kg, 1 x 4 @15kg, 1 x 4 @10kg)
One-Arm Bent Over Row (3 x 10 @24kg)
Romanian Deadlift (4 x 5 @80kg)

About 60 seconds rest between sets.

Total Time: 16 minutes

Nutrition, based on Leangains experiment (did higher carb on Tuesday, so almost zero carb today.)

20 minutes before: 10g BCAA
1 hour after: 10g BCAA
2 hours after: 10g BCAA

Lunch (12:00pm) - salmon, sardines, walnuts, extra tuna, lemon

Today was a 'hard' day for back exercises, so I went to near-failure on chin ups and one-arm dumbbell rows. I progressed by a single rep on chin-ups. This may not seem like much, but I definitely felt stronger.

After last week's video showed me how badly my form had slipped on Romanian Deadlift, I dropped the weight on deadlift and followed some of the advice from the comments.

- Started with the bar at waist height
- Kept back as flat as possible

Here is the video.



Not having to lift the bar from the ground on the first rep made a big difference. There is something about Romanian Deadlift that makes the first rep especially awkward when you start with the bar on the floor.

Even though I dropped the weight significantly, keeping my back totally flat made it still feel hard. I am happy to re-calibrate my expectations about strength and work upwards from here.

3 comments:

Chris Robbins said...

While it's perfectly acceptable to do the deadlift as a touch and go exercise, I believe it properly should be done at a dead stop. Weight should be unloaded before lifting it again, hence "deadlift".

Would love to hear others thoughts on this.

Methuselah said...

Chris - I can see the reasoning, and perhaps it was always intended as a 1-rep exercise, as I think someone commented on my last post about this. In the case of RDLs, I find it quite awkward doing a rep from a dead stop - and someone commented in the last post that in fact RDLs should be done from a standing start. Will be interested to see if anyone else has any thoughts.

Anonymous said...

I would aslo consider ditching running shorts and getting something longer, that way you avoid treating everyone in the gym to a glimpse of half your flange.