In 2023, I was 148 lbs bodyweight. I set a deadlift PR of 245 lbs at the time, and I have since lost 15 lbs and have significantly reduced body fat.
I’m trying to get my powerlifting total to 1000, and I decided to take a shot at my old PR while on vacation in Mexico.
My buddy and I went to a gym yesterday, and I pulled 225 (grip was difficult for this because I don’t do hook grip yet) and couldn’t break 230 (as seen in the video).
Here’s what I believe went wrong:
I was on 3 - 4 hours of sleep
I had been travelling all day and had just gotten into Mexico City
I was using those funny plates instead of round plates, though idk if that made a difference vs just throwing me off
the knurling on the bar was smooth, which may have affected my grip, but again, unsure if this was a major issue
I made my 1 RM attempt with arbitrary 25lb jumps instead of following some sort of pre-planned 1RM warmup routine
It looked as though I was too far from the bar. Moving closer to the bar may help me.
My hips appear to be rising, and I think the way around that is to “cue for pushing away from the floor” and idk… Keeping the chest up while pulling?
Also, my friend said that I was pushing more than I was pulling, and that it looked as though I wasn’t engaging my lats or pulling enough. Does anyone have any thoughts on this and on cueing?
I know this sounds overconfident and possibly far-fetched, but I do believe that if I correct the technique error that’s standing in my way, I’ll be able to do this weight. Surely, there must be something that I can just fix. 225 came right off the ground after I broke it off the floor. Let me know if you all see anything else that I’m not seeing.
Looks like the bar was way too far forward (perhaps due to the plates), making it so you never had a chance to break it off the floor. Your hips are rising because the bar was too far forward. I wouldn’t cue anything about your chest, “pushing”, lats, or so on. The set up was pickled from the get go. The grip also looks to be contributory. I don’t think any of the travel or fatigue stuff helped either.
Perhaps germane to the conversation, one may wonder why max out on vacation at all? If under conditions that aren’t very similar to a previous test, I’m not sure how much information that would provide. Additionally, I’d wonder about your recent training for the deadlift in particular, as I suspect regular training of the lift would help you feel the technique being off here.
All solid insights, yes. It’s a relief to me that there’s one big thing that I can immediately fix, at least for now. No good reasons for maxing out on vacation, and I think your post has underscored that if I want to be serious about training, I shouldn’t be maxing out on days without reproducible conditions. I just never get to lift with this one friend I was with, and we wanted to have some fun lifting heavy so I decided to take a shot at it. Unfortunately, it looks like it may do more harm than good.
I have been skipping deadlift sets during the weeks from time to time because I haven’t been managing my time properly in order to be able to train, so that query was dead on. I’ve been trying to keep my Beginner Program workouts to 1 hour, and I keep running over time and skipping the last lift at times or skipping two movements sometimes when I run in with only thirty minutes to train. I have been able to do the DLx4 days because they fall on Saturdays and because the deadlift is the first workout that day, but I haven’t been able to get it done the other day when it’s at the end, or the rows for that matter, which also involve at least part of the deadlift setup. It’s a fixable issue, and again, I’ve realized that if I want to take this seriously, I have to graduate from the whole “just do any of the lifts, anything you can with the time you have” mentality and chalk out a solid 90 minutes to be able to get it all done. Otherwise, the “build technique” portion of the program is going unused and I imagine this would probably lead to injury.
The grip I was using wasn’t the hook grip. When you said the grip may be contributory, did you mean that the hook grip should be used instead of were you suggesting something else, like the wrists should be straighter or the bar should be higher in the hand? I saw something about that on a Pana video on YouTube but then abandoned it when this lift wasn’t working out and just tried to grip the bar and pull, which likely simply isn’t the way to go about this.
Copy that. For your training, you may prefer the Time Crunch program given the time constraints you mention. It includes a number of different programs to accomodate your preferred training schedule and goals.
Regarding the grip comment, I meant that whatever grip you were using did not look secure. Most people won’t be able to hook grip max weights without previous training using the hook grip. In that case, and when someone really wants to/needs to lift a maximal weight without straps, the alternate grip is preferred. For training purposes, I do not think a double overhand grip is viable for the deadlift at circa-maximal weights. I’d use straps (for most non-competitors), train the hook grip, or use alternate grip.
So I trained the hook grip, and attempted 245 in my garage. It went well, I think, but I was wondering about this pre-lift movement my body is making.
I noticed that, before breaking the bar off the ground, my body is kinda rotating forward. The hips are moving up and forward and my shoulders and head seem to be hovering forward over the bar. Bad? Expected? Can be fixed with better setup and some cueing?
Yea, this was a relatively easy rep. Your hips went up and shoulders went forward because during setup, your hips were too low (and shoulders too far back). I would set up a bit closer to the bar so that your hips and shoulders end up being in the correct position.
I think it’s fine to do single-rep efforts in training if someone is interested in maximal strength. However, I would not recommend more frequent testing than every ~ 6 months or so.
This lift in the video was done in a setting where my friends came over to do squat, bench and deadlift. They were doing fahves (they don’t typically do any of this) and I was doing some 1RM workout I found on the internet, but instead of going for RPE 10, I was going for RPE 8.5-9 on my singles.
I was hoping to run this sort of group workout once every 1-2 months or so, but was also wondering.. if I kept the singles at RPE 8.5-9, might I still be able to get the entertainment value out of doing heavy singles in front of my friends with minimal risk of injury? Or are the odds of injury just so high with singles during the beginner phase of my strength training career that I should genuinely avoid even an RPE 8.5 single until I’m completely out of the novice phase of training?
I plan on continuing the beginner program 3x/week the rest of the time. I’m at week 4 of phase 1 and would be happy to be stuck there as long as I can until my progress slows.
I don’t think the risk of injury is very high, but I think you’d get more out of your training by sticking to the appropriate programming. I do agree that you need to practice singles to maximize your performance, but I don’t think it’s a good use of your time right now. Just my 0.02.
