Beltless Paused DL is similar to my belted DL

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello,

Before I get into it I just want to share my appreciation for the thought put into your templates. I finished PB 1 about 4-5 weeks ago and have moved onto Strength 1. So far my bench is on a roll and absolutely thriving off of the volume/frequency. Same for all of my lifts really but my bench has been super stubborn for a long time. A few questions:

  1. My beltless 2 ct paused sumo deadlift is only 7% lower than my belted sumo pull with no pause. Here is a video of my paused deadlifts from today rated at rpe 8. Imgur: The magic of the Internet Is 7% a normal gap between the two? To me it feels kind of close. Do you think I should change anything to get more out of this specific variation?

  2. I’ve been pulling sumo for about 2 months now. I was building momentum during the second half of PB1 so I skipped the deload at the beginning of strength 1. Everything continued to move well and I rolled into the 4th week of Strength 1 with everything moving well until the second day. The prior week I had a huge performance increase on SSB squats (added 23 lbs to e1rm in a week). The following week my performance dropped back down to baseline for lack of a better word but on the 3rd set I felt like I tweaked my back. My first sign was the feeling of my spine feeling abnormally compressed and “sore” after unracking my third set. The 2nd sign was finishing that set and feeling pretty sharp pain in my mid back through my lats whenever I turned my torso at all. I called it on squats for that day and moved on to press which I was able to complete with zero issues. I didn’t have any noticeable form deviations that I can remember.

Fast forward 2 days later and my left hip hurt like hell after my deadlifts. I didn’t even bother to give squats a try that day for fear of potentially making anything worse. Spent the rest of the night laying on my bed and limping around because it was rough putting weight on that leg. The following week (last week) I took a deload and feel pretty good now. Zero pain that interferes with any lifting.

My question is could the increase in volume of squatting and deadlifting from PB1 to Strength 1 play a factor in the pain I was experiencing? As a further extension do you think it would be appropriate if I were to knock off a set of paused sumo pulls and SSB squats during week 3-6 of the program for my first run through? Everything felt spot on until the 5th set of each was added and I didn’t have any specific performance decreases outside of the last week of SSB squats. Everything was progressing very nicely. No down performances at all actually for that entire 7 weeks.

2

JP,

  1. How do you know? Have you maxed out on both? The paused DL are probably a bit lighter than @ 8, but I also don’t think there should be a big gap between the paused DL and regular DL. I don’t know that I’d consider it a problem either, particularly with a new technique (sumo in this case).

  2. I don’t think this is volume related, no. I think some bad luck along with skipping the intro week would be my guess if forced to assign blame. I wouldn’t adjust volume if things are rolling. I probably would ease into sumo a bit more gradually, either doing it once per week and conventional the other time and/or reducing intensity further on the sumo pulls.

-Jordan

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3

I haven’t maxed out both but for about 2 months earlier this year I pushed paused variations as my main lifts while running the bridge 3.0. When I transitioned back to standard conventional deadlifts my top single at 8 wasn’t very far off from my top paused single at 8. For the current sumo pulls I’m basing that assessment off of the e1rms and my sets of 5 of each.

Okay good to go. As far as skipping the intro week I was under the impression based off of some of the podcast content pertaining to deloads that if training was going well to not deload?

Thank you, JP

4

I don’t think it’s surprising that your paused DL responded well to being prioritized. As far as the “deload”, if you’re changing training blocks I would do the low stress week.

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5

Okay that clears things up for me. Thanks Jordan!