So here I am, 2 weeks out from competition. I should be getting my openers and letting my CNS recover. Everything should be good to go and I should be ready to compete. But of course I'm not. In typical fashion, I had to tweak and adjust my form some more in the hopes that I will find some epiphany, some long forgotten secret that if found, will make me stronger. This is like cramming for a test. They say it does no good, but I did it through high school, and college, and let me tell you... the shit works. As I am sure you read in my last entry about my deadlift, I have been trying to improve the external rotation of the hips so that I can get my knees out further, and develop more power through my hips. I did this by trying to open them up as much as possible for the deadlift. Doing so allowed me to keep a more upright posture and use less of my back to make the lift. Result, 25lbs PR. So I say to myself, "Well, it worked on the deadlift, maybe it can keep my knees from collapsing in the squat under heavy weight." Now I am a fairly wide squatter and my technique almost looks like I should be in gear, but if you have any issue with your knees collapsing, this may help. What did I do? I rotated my feet out even more. I noticed immediately, that my body WANTED to keep my knees out. I felt like I had been missing out this whole time. I take a lot of tips and training advice from the EliteFTS guys and on one video, Dave Tate actually says you have much better stability with a North-South foot position. In other words, heels and toes pointing straight ahead and behind. This made sense to me. But therein lies the number one most important rule of life; What works for someone else, may not work for you. My switching to a more externally rotated stance hooked me up with a 25lbs PR today. I nailed 575 like it was nothing. Simply by giving my squat stance more of a sumo style foot position. Here is the video.
You can kind of see my foot position in this stance, notice the toes pointed out quite a bit.
2 Weeks out from the SPF Pro/Am in Manchester, TN. Elite status, here I come. NBS Fitness should have another good showing. I think we have won every team competition to date, and we don't plan on stopping now.
The deadlift. The most infuriating lift for me. I can't express to you how much it pisses me off. I've been hanging around at a max of 525 forever. After failing miserably at getting better at it, I started trying to adjust my technique. My accessory workouts weren't helping. I was doing a lot of reverse hypers, GHR's, RDL's, and any other lower back and posterior chain exercise I could think of. I had to fix it. I HAD to. It was the lift in my last meet that prevented me from getting an elite total. I was getting desperate. I guess like any other lifter, I have an epiphany every now and again that fixes a problem, or provides some sort of tweak in the technique to make it work. I don't come up with this stuff on my own of course. I have great teammates and fellow lifters at the gym that help, and I have videos of great lifters for that. Like any serious sport, watching film gives you an insight on what your opponent does well, and doesn't do well. Those plates of iron and that bar.... are my enemy. An inanimate object. An object that does absolutely nothing but move where you move it to. I watched video of my opponent. Studying every move it made. And I figured it out. I figured out what was going to work for me. It's all nothing I haven't heard before of course, I get good coaching, but I guess sometimes you just have to figure it out on your own. My epiphany came watching Daniel Green, who is the current world record holder in the 242lbs RAW division for total weight lifted. Here is a picture of his setup.
Notice how open his hips are which lets him spread his knees way out. Toes pointed out. Very upright posture. Although I don't have the hip mobility that he has, I have been trying to emulate this form. Trying to work on my hip mobility which in turn also helps my squat. So instead of using all lower back to get the weight off the floor, he uses the power in his hips. When he gets towards the upper part of the lift, his entire back is already in an upright position so all he has to do is lock those hips out. Great technique.
Here is a video of me about a year ago at an SPF Nationals meet barely getting up 485. What you see is my feet pointed forward, very closed hips with knees barely out. As soon as I pull, shoulders come forward and my lower back is grinding that sonofabitch up inch by inch all the way up.
Now here is the other day. Now it's not perfect because I still don't have the hip mobility, but it's a lot closer. As soon as I can get my knees pointed out further, I'll be able to get lower without having to bend at the waist. This will obviously keep me in a more upright position. Not only will more power be generated from the hips, but it will keep me further behind the bar and prevent my shoulders from coming in front and over the bar. This is a 550lbs pull. Now, aside from the technique, my mental state was different. I was pissed. I'm usually self motivated, without the need to yell at the weight and get myself all amped up. But not this day. I was furious. Furious at that weight for not moving where I wanted to move it to. Pure rage spilled out onto that bar. It was a 25lbs PR which would normally not be something I would go for. Remember the scene in The Dark Knight Rises when Bruce Wayne jumps to his freedom in that prison. No rope. The fear is what let him do it. That was almost as awesome as my lift.
It's the first step of course. To actually lift, you need a place to lift at. You would think that after over 15 years of working out, training, lifting etc... that I would know what I was doing. Well, it was apparent that I was just like any of the other untrained and ignorant masses. We did our thing at this huge commercial gym for a couple years. Standard big box store kind of place. Indoor pools, basketball courts, racquetball courts, a bazillion cardio machines, weight machines as far as the eye could see. Hell, you could blast your calves on 4 different contraptions. Oh, I almost forgot, here is the less important stuff that commercial gyms all seem to have. Music that was set on 94.7 the river, no chalk, no tolerance for those who would bring chalk, dumbbells that went all the way up to 80, rubber coated 45's that were actually only the diameter of normal 35's, ONE squat rack that was filled with dude's hitting their broceps all the time, no Olympic platforms, no deadlift bars, or squat bars, or Olympic bars. If you grunt nailing that sweet 205 bench press, people would look at you funny and tell you that if you had to make noise it was too heavy. Same with deadlifts or powercleans. Sounds like Planet Fitness doesn't it? It wasn't...... it was just a normal, everyday, commercial gym. The gym most of you probably go to. It's not your fault though, for not knowing any better. We didn't either. There was a trainer there named David Allen. He would bring chains, and strongman implements to help train his clients with. One day after about a year of lifting there, he says to us, "Hey guys, I'm opening my own facility soon, you should come check it out." He went on to explain what kind of place this was going to be. Metal playing at high volumes, chalk everywhere, people yelling at each other, weights dropping and noise being made, dumbbells up to like 150. Chains, bands, implements, specialty bars. This wasn't a gym, it was a meat head training facility. More on the gym later, the point is, you have options. There are smaller privately held gyms out there where monsters are bred. Take a look at every powerlifter, strongman, bodybuilder out there. Almost NONE of them are at a commercial gym unless they are making some sort of celebrity guest appearance. The fact is, even with all that equipment, a commercial gym just can't accommodate the truly bad ass. Use GOOGLE. Find a facility near you that is a specialty gym. They are out there. They are intimidating as shit at first, but the folks in there are so much nicer than you would expect. There is much less ego, because these folks know what they are doing, and they like showing other people how to do it right if asked. There is no better motivation than being around people that are intense. Don't waste your time training at a gym where you are one of the strongest and most knowledgeable people. You have to be chasing someone, and someone has to be chasing you. Our facility is called NBS Fitness in Memphis, TN, and it will melt your face.
So there I was, drunk with my buddies at the local flying saucer. "You know what? We need to start lifting again", I say. I had been in the military like 6 years at this point. Too busy, or too poor or just too fucking lazy to hit the gym. I was a college athlete, played Div I football at Mississippi State for a couple years back in the late 90's. I use the term "played" loosely because I never saw a snap in an actual game. But I was there, on a big time, no shit SEC team. I worked my ass off. Lifted at 4:30 in the morning every day as a freshman. Strong, fast, agile, I was at my peak. Or so I thought. Why do I even mention this stuff? Well because I'm bragging... But the point is, being an athlete and a lifter defined me. At some point after college I lost that part of me for a few years. So here we are at the bar, a couple good buddies, great drunk ideas, motivated. Guess what happened the next day? We did it. We joined the gym and went there every day. I know, surprising that we made good on a drunk vow to start improving ourselves again. None of my other ideas have ever worked out after a couple pints but this one did. So that is how, in my early 30's, I got back in the gym.
