Getting ready for my first PL meet on July 18th, and was looking for some advice, critique on my deadlift.
Currently I’m 208lbs at 5’8" and just finished up my fifth cycle of 5/3/1 with a best rep deadlift of 430 x 7.
I’m putting up a vid of a 455 successful lift and a 505 miss. Any help will be appreciated.
and here’s the 505 miss. grrrr
you have good speed off the floor. in my opinion, you need to get those hips through faster. as it passes the knees force the hips to the bar instead of leaning back with it.
elevated pulls set at knee level really working the hips through should do the trick. pull throughs are a great accessory move as well.
it looks to me that you might need to sit back more on that lift. do you pull conventional, or sumo?
I agree with meat on the hip speed and pullthroughs definitely help.
But, I would also take a look at the hamstrings. You are losing bar speed below the knee. You don’t lose the tightness in your back, so I would reason that stronger hammies will keep the momentum going “around” the knee. SLDLs, GHRs, good mornings.
yeah the level of your hips is changing too rapidly compared to your shoulders off the floor. Try and drive up with those shoulders and drive the heels into the ground. Looking upwards is a good cue till you get the feel of that groove. Be thinking about pulling it “back” in a sense. hard to explain without demonstration but it think you’ll get the idea.
-chris
I noramlly tell someone to “pull back” with the shoulders, but to drive their hips forward like they’re “fucking the bar”. That cue’s normalyl a hit or miss, though. Lol. But you want to drop your hips a little bit lower, use your hamstrings to drive the bar up and your pelvis from its tilt to straight. Right now, you’re using your back a lot more than your hamstrings/glutes.
u train at 24?
[quote]brauny96 wrote:
it looks to me that you might need to sit back more on that lift. do you pull conventional, or sumo?[/quote]
you really cant tell?
thanks guys, I appreciate the comments.
I pull conventional, that is the ARC at SD State. Pull throughs are a normal part of my routine as are Goodmornings, but I’ll see about adding some knee height pulls, I like that idea MM. I also bought a GHR at a gym auction and put it in the fight gym that I go to (only go to ARC on deadlift days) as I know my hammy’s need work.
I had a nasty complete tear of the long head of my biceps femoris and my right hammy will never be the same, but I’ll be damned if I won’t make it get me a decent pull one of these days.
Any other cues or exercises that people think might help get my hips through quicker?
Honestly, it looks to me like you just missed the lift.
Your body position was decent you just didn’t have the strength to finish. Getting your hips through sounds great until you hit a limit lift.
Two things you could work on is learning to lock out further down your thighs (In other words, tighten up your lockout and do not over travel at the top. Learn to let the weight settle and pull your shoulders down) and as a cue as soon as you feel the weight break the floor thrust your hips to the bar.
You can analyze it all you want but at the end of the day just keep training and it will come.
I think your form looks solid.
In my opinion, the answer you seek lies more in the first video (455) than the second (495).
Firstly, your feet seemed closer to the bar in the first video than the second, I could be wrong though.
Watch the first video. The lift doesn’t get tough, the others are correct, until right about where your suppose to “pull through” and move your hips forward. But straining the hips alone does not seem enough to achieve the lift successfully.
The REASON your body doesn’t want to pull through, is because your hips beat your back on the way up. They came up to quick in proportion to your mid/upper body. You can actually see your glutes shake (No homo) at that very point, and see that the strain was on them more than anything, because of how it was awkward. pause the vid at that very moment, and look how bent over you look.
In the missed attempt, you got stuck at that point. Naturally, you actually tried to bring your ass back down and THEN complete the lift. The ass dropped before you went to put the weight down. It’s not because you tried to lean back and pull it up, it’s because the glutes were too stretched and under too much strain to pull from how high they were. You lifted it off the ground conventionally, but if you pause the video at that point, it looks like you were doing stiff (not straight) legged romanian style deadlifts.
With the way you start off your deadlift, you don’t have enough strength off your glutes or pressure on your heels. You can sit here and try these exercises to make that stronger, or you can take what your strong at and make it better. For example, if your better with your elbows tucked on the bench than spread open and wide, but when you go to bench, you tend to allow your elbows to open and your missing lifts, don’t work on benching with your elbows open, work on your form and keep your elbows in.
No offense to you other guys, and your points were valid, but it was too late for him to “pull back”. And for him to work on that would make him more well rounded, but won’t have him ready to lift by the 18th. especially if he’s trying to not only learn a new form, but strengthen it.
my 2 cents:
you need to pull your back up and back faster. it seems to me that your hips come up too fast in ratio to your upper body
you may just need to get stronger at deadlifting also.
but who doesnt? 
It looks to me as though you start out of position. You have your hips far too low and your shoulders are too far back. Your scapula should be directly over the bar. When the bar does break off the floor you are in a much better pulling position than your original set-up. My thinking is you start out in the proper pulling position you conserve energy and will have a better shot at pulling bigger weights. Start in the proper position and try to break the bar off the floor with the upper back and put pressure into your heels. I wouldn’t suggest making too many (if any) changes before the meet however.
Btw, the cover of Rippetoe’s book Starting Strength has a good depiction of the proper pulling position: http://www.elitefts.com/documents/deeper_into_deadlift.htm Notice the difference in positioning of the knees, upper back, and butt from what you are currently doing.
By the way, I imagine you put 430x7 into a 1 rep max calculator and got something like 530. Everyone is a little different when it comes to relating rep maxes with true 1 rep maxes.