- But I urge you not to duplicate my deadlifting form. Use much more leg
strength than I did, and keep your back flat.. Natural squatters usually use lots of thigh strength in their deadlifting. ey
are more able to maintain a flat back than are less-gifted squatters who
use more back strength because of comparatively weaker thighs. Natural
deadlifters have a tendency to want to bent-legged deadlift more akin to stiff-
legged deadlifts (but with slightly bent legs) than the regular style that uses
lots of thigh pushing strength. e great Bob Peoples—who, as noted in
Chapter , deadlifted a stupendous . pounds at a bodyweight of just
pounds, and using the overhand hook grip—lifted with a rounded back
and relatively little use of his thighs.The long cycle
. I started the deadlift cycle on November , and peaked at pounds
for reps on July . at was a cycle of nearly eight months. Prior to
the November start I had done some preliminary work in the stiff-legged
deadlift, building to sets of five reps with pounds while standing on a
platform so that the bar touched the laces of my shoes between reps. Today
I neither perform this excessive range of movement myself, nor recommend
others do. I do the stiff-legged deadlift on and to the floor, with -kilo
plates on the bar.. To be sure to establish my deadlifting style, as I had not done the regular
deadlift for about two years, and to get plenty of gaining momentum going,
I started off very light— pounds. While I finished with × , I only
moved to reps at the end of the cycle. For almost the whole cycle I was
performing sets of reps in the deadlift.. I could have started the cycle at a bigger poundage and tried to compress
the eight months of relatively slow progression into – months of quicker
progress. Patience and a slow rate of progress are imperative for success,
however, so I resisted the urge to hurry. On hindsight, if I had been more
patient I could have extended the cycle.. In the early part of the cycle, because the poundage was light, I did all
reps continuously—no short pause before each rep. e plates touched the
platform between reps in what could have been considered “touch and go.”
is was a mistake because it was easy to touch only one side of the plates
on the platform, lose the vital symmetrical pulling style, and jar myself into