I hope everyone’s training is going well so far this year. Post your updates or weekly PR’s to the comments to celebrate PR Friday
Also, I don’t have confirmation on this, but apparently Allison Bishop (AllisonNYC for you CF vets) has allegedly committed to doing a max effort clean and jerk in a bikini if Donny Shankle gets to his fundraising goal (read the first part of this post). Now let’s get on with the bloody Q&A, eh?
sdanleyjr asks:
This week’s collection of articles has me all worried about balanced ham/quad development. If I look in the mirror I’d say I’m pretty quad dominant, however I just LBBS my way up to 405# before switching back to HBBS. If I’m doing all of the following once a week – HBBS, front squat, snatch, C&J, deadlift – should I be doing some RDLs as well?
Dear sdanleyjr,
I’m a huge proponent of RDL’s, especially for lifters who aren’t in the ‘later intermediate stages’ and beyond. I’d even to venture and say that the RDL’s will be better for your programming than the deadlifts — CRAZY TALK. It looks like you’re training for weightlifting, and heavy deadlifts are going to require significant local and systemic recovery. Not only are you using your limited supply of recovery credits on the expensive deadlift, but you may be inhibiting the clean, snatch, or squat workouts that occur after the deadlifting (even if they are the following week). If you’re primarily training to be a weightlifter, you’ll get good hamstring and lumbar musculature work out of the RDL and still have some zing for the rest of your program.
At the Chicago lifting seminar you discussed the phenomenon of one’s hamstrings sputtering during a heavy deadlift (you referred to it as ‘tut-tut-tut’). I can’t remember your explanation on this and was hoping you could explain it on the site. I recently pulled a one rep max deadlift and my hamstrings were tut-tut-tutting like The Little Engine That Could.
Dear jaygreenshirt,
It’s awesome to hear from you. For everyone else, Jay was one of two Jays at the Chicago workshop, and when I said the name “Jay”, my friend Jay S. kept saying, “What?” So I resorted to calling this Jay “Jay Green Shirt” since he was wearing a green shirt. Apparently Ellee still has him saved as that in her phone.
Anyway, this is a good question. The “tut-tut-tut” sputtering that occurs when locking out heavy deadlifts (watch the second rep at 625) is a neurological result of not being adapted to high levels of tension in the hamstrings. Assuming good mechanics (that would maintain hamstring tension), the intrafusal muscle fibers (in this case, the golgi tendon organ) of the hamstring are monitoring levels of tension in the muscle. If tension is too high, then the GTO will essentially shut the muscle off to prevent injury. Your conscious effort to pull the weight forces a resuming in the contraction, or “turning the muscle back on”. The GTO then senses high levels of tension and turns it off again. This back-and-forth could occur several times and feels like a stuttering lockout that I sum up as a “tut-tut-tut” (usually I mimic the move as I say it in a workshop).
So what the FUCK does all of that mean? You are relatively unadapted to the higher levels of tension that you were imparting on the muscle and it’s associated nerve functioning. How can this be fixed? Rack pulls are usually the go-to method of improving that ability to experience high tension. If you watched the linked video above of Chris first couple reps at a 600+ pounds, you can see it occur. Shortly after that I had him do rack pulls and he never had those tension issues again (see below for Chris pulling 655×2 the other day). RDL’s are also another good way to improve the hamstring’s ability to experience tension. The weight won’t be as heavy, yet the different mechanics will still stretch the hamstring and make it contract under tension. Regularly using both of these lifts will eradicate the tut-tut, yet also getting more reps with higher intensity deadlifts will help in the short term as well.
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