The dead weight. Elevation of the ego of the lower body. Large numbers and heavy weights can be put on quite easily for most athletes when practicing this lift. Like everything else, with success comes rush and with rush comes low quality and diligence. For any athlete who uses the deadlift regularly, CrossFit, powerlifters, or traditional athletes, it is a move that should be used with care. This article will talk about why you don’t need to deadlift for max, replacements, and specifically how this applies to CrossFit athletes.
Do not misunderstand. As a trainer and athlete, I will argue that the deadlift is a very valuable strengthening tool for the posterior chain. Not many lifts use so many large muscles that allow us to lift such large amounts of weight. It is not that uncommon to see an athlete training with the deadlift for only a few months to reach the point where they can lift 1.5x or even 2x body weight and more. With more accessory training and time, a 3X greater deadlift can be achieved for the most trained and best-trained athletes. For this and other reasons, it is a lift that needs to be closely monitored in training cycles.
The reason I am careful about deadlifting, both in my own training and in the training of the athletes I work with, is that it is extremely exhausting when training at its maximum, both on the CNS due to the large amount of holding weight, and on the rear chain. In reference to the first, if an athlete is training to the maximum (and to the maximum refers to working with a maximum weight for a scheme of repetitions of 3 or less) every week or more than once a week, it is most likely that you are using the lower body more than it is worth, which greatly affects the following days of training. In reference to the latter, any coach or athlete who is relatively well educated in strength training will say that training lifts to the max will sometimes lead to a lifter losing perfect form. Some coaches may even argue (I am among them) that it is okay to lose shape to some extent during a max lift because it trains the body how to come out of a less than perfect lift safely and successfully. However, with the large amount of weight that is lifted in the deadlift, less than perfect form can lead to tension and pain in the lower back, hips, and hamstrings, and can even lead to injury. Like the problem with taxes on the central nervous system, this causes athletes to miss training days. No matter what sport you are training for, this is not good.
So what other options do we have?
The Soviets were on to something with their weightlifting studies in the days of the Iron Curtain. The reason so much good information, not just about lifting but about strength development in general, comes from that time is because they had a large population participating in the sport of weightlifting. With so many people training for strength, Soviet trainers were able to develop very tried and true theories on how to get strong while maintaining a very high level of volume every day.
The key ingredient: speed.
Speed is king. This philosophy has been adopted by training methods around the world and in all different sports. Louie Simmons has taken this idea and created a complete training template based on moving the weight as fast as possible and keeping the muscles under tension during these high speed lifts. It has been proven time and again that the best way to gain strength is by applying maximum force to a bar as quickly as possible.
This speed is all relative. Obviously, the speed at which you lift a squat that is your 1rm is going to be much slower than the speed at which you lift 50% of that speed on your dynamic squat days. But exerting as much force as possible to lift that weight is equivalent to moving a lighter weight with explosive speed, allowing you to enter different motor units and different / larger muscles than a lighter load / slower lift. The important thing is the number of times you can activate these motor units.
Motor units are what make the muscle contract. You want to lift something, the brain sends a signal to the muscles, the motor units are activated, they make the muscles contract, we lift. However, their motor units are ordered from small to large. The smallest shoot the easiest and first, the largest are the hardest to recruit and shoot last. You may have guessed that the smaller motor units are connected to smaller muscle fibers, the larger motor units are connected to larger muscle fibers. So what we have here is a neat little order that dictates how and when we access the largest muscles in our body. This is called the Henneman Size Principle. It uses small motor units to lift loads that are sub-maximum and only takes advantage of the larger motor units by lifting maximum loads … or lifting at maximum speed. Small motor units are more sustainable, which means you can use them repetitively more easily, while large motor units tire faster and take longer to recover. Remember this later.
Think of it in terms of the fight or flight mindset. In the past, I’m talking about time ago, fight or flight meant being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or not being eaten. The pinnacle of this fighting mentality is when you’re getting it out of that cave faster than the tiger, or even when you rip the tooth out of the tiger’s mouth and use it to stab the beast to death. It is at this peak that you are recruiting everyone, including your body’s largest motor units and muscles. It’s how / why you can achieve outrageous feats of strength under pressure.
How do you simulate this situation during training? Making your body exert the greatest amount of force and therefore speed possible on a load. So let’s look at the deadlift. A ton of force is being used to lift a 500 # 1RM, right? It may not be super fast, but it has definitely flipped that fight switch and got into those bigger motor units during the lift. So why not lift 1 rm once a week?
Think about how often you can lift that 1RM deadlift in one session. Then think about how often you can safely lift it. This is where we come into use efficiency. What Elwood Henneman discovered, the Soviets experimented, and Louie Simmons applied is that we can get bigger and stronger not only by lifting highs here and there, but also lifting sub-maxs as fast as possible over and over again. If you can recruit the same large motor units that you do by doing a 1rm, the same ones that are connected to the largest muscles in your body, lifting 50-70% of that multiple times in a session, what do you think is most beneficial? to build strength? If you can tap into those large motor units / large muscles several, if not 10 times, in a training session, you are going to train those nerves (motor units) to be able to shoot more often without fatigue and thus be able to train. those bigger / stronger muscles more often.
For example, instead of lifting that 1RM deadlift weekly, think about doing Olympic lifts at varying percentages almost every day. This is not only done to improve your Olympic lifts, but explosively pulling off the ground (exerting maximum force and speed on a load) engages those larger motor units. While you may not always recruit the biggest and strongest, you are training it to take advantage of those larger units and muscle groups on a repetitive basis. It not only applies to strength, but it also applies specifically to CrossFit. To perform at the highest level in this sport, you must be able to move the weight very quickly and over and over again. In other words, you need to be able to recruit those high-level motor units, the largest muscles in your body, over and over again. If you only train them once at a time, you train them to shoot / recruit once at a time.
To replace the lack of heavy load, he also performs heavy but explosive jerks once a week. By putting more of your maximum clean or snatch into your pulls and doing it as fast as you can, you’re taking advantage of the larger, harder-to-reach motor units. By doing them for reps, you are forcing / training them to shoot repeatedly. So not only are you training yourself mentally to be able to pull a heavier weight than ever, but you are training yourself physically to actually be able to do it. This correlates with an increase in deadlift because regardless of the load on the bar, you are training the largest and most powerful muscles in your body MULTIPLE TIMES per set, not just one at a time. Build muscular strength and endurance in a variety of ways.
Where Louie Simmons helped even more was by convincing the masses of the benefits of adapting to resistance. The bands and chains used for vertical lifts mean that even when using a submaximal weight, an athlete has to shoot throughout the lift. This is made possible by accommodation resistance that adds weight / resistance as the lift (usually) becomes easier. Think on top of the deadlift, bench, squat. This requires an athlete to be explosive not only during the hard “sticking point” of the lift, but throughout the entire process, making recruitment of the aforementioned high-end motor units happen even at a “lighter” weight. .
Be aware of your speed with each lift. Lifting aggressively and quickly allows you to get stronger. You don’t have to always use a max load to get stronger using the science above. That’s why with The ProgramWOD and at CrossFit Lando we squat with specific percentages and reps and why we do a lot of dynamic lifting. If you can move it faster, do it.
Elite athletes need to train efficiently. This does not refer only to the time, but also to the tension of the body. There is no use for an athlete to train against the ground or suffer an injury. The goal is to be able to train at a high level all or most of the time. Deadlifting is not necessarily “bad” for you, but it certainly puts a strain on your central nervous system and causes a lot of pain and injury. If we can avoid this, why wouldn’t we? Of course, the stimulus of doing a deadlift multiple times should still be used because it is a very different and specific stimulus. But movements like dynamic pulls, box squats, and lighter deadlifts with adaptive resistance can be used in place of several days of maximum deadlifts in a training cycle. This allows an athlete to continually build strength throughout the training waves without taking extended time off due to exhaustion or injury.