Simplicity

Scott Birdby Scott Bird | October 25, 2004
Filed in ME SQ/DL , videos , workouts | 3 comments

DeadliftWith support from the Cowboys from Hell, Pantera, I began work on my favourite lift; the beautifully simple deadlift. For a movement that is really no more complicated than picking a heavy object off the ground, it seems to induce more sweat than just about anything else.

With the intention of refining my form for this deceptively simple lift, I recorded a few of the pulls today for critical review. Or my own future amusement when I start working with serious weights. Hopefully both.

Weighing in at a hefty 6MB (larger than I’d like, but no doubt the process will be gradually refined with future offerings), the video [.wmv, 4m25s ] also includes the first set of the other exercises from this afternoon’s session.

Certainly enough to ensure a good night’s sleep.

ME SQ/DL
Deadlift 2×5@20kg, 3@40kg, 3@60kg, 2@90kg, 2@110kg, 1@120kg, 1@130kg, 0@135kg (failed attempt)
Romanian deadlift (platform) 4×6@85kg
Good morning (seated) 4×6@40kg
Good morning 4×6@50kg
Hanging knee raise 20,20,17@bw


Total time : 69 mins (plenty of video replay action)

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Discussion

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Comments

1

REALLY nice to see some footage. Of course, now that you’ve started you won’t stop right? Right?

My four cents on form: your deadlift is close to a stiff-legged dead in that you use very little leg drive. Now this is how many great lifters do pull, so nothing wrong with that, especially since you got long arms and don’t need to bend all that much down in the first place compared to a short armed lifter. With my similar build, I also have a tendency to pull this way. You could experiment with more leg drive though, although that does have a tendency (I think) of making the lift a lot more technically difficult. A question: You were pulling it from the low pins, is this to spare the floor? Am also curious to know if you have any neighbors around and if so, does it affect your training? And while it, what equipment do you use to record (good quality)?

On the good mornings I’d say your range of motion is quite short, at least compared to some of the Westside videos where some guys actually go below parallel. I broke my back at parallel, so I see a lot sense in doing them shorter… Again, there are variants of the GM that are done quite short range, so nothing inherently wrong here either. On the seated good morning I would attempt to go down a little further. On the standing one you’re bringing the buttocks back nicely and form per se looks good.

Overall, my novice eye spotted no major problems based on a two runs. Your form looks quite healthy in that you don’t jerk but pull smoothly. Am also suitably impressed by the way you hold yourself in a partial pull-up during the hanging knee raises; I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure. Also, great music!

Posted by: Kris | October 25, 2004 8:42 PM

2

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated. I certainly haven’t done as much experimentation with the deadlift technique as I’d like to (and intend to do in the future), and have been wondering about the lack of leg drive for a while. I’ve ordered the Westside Deadlift Secrets DVD, so it’ll be interesting to look at the form of lifters on there.

As you’ve guessed, I’m pulling from the pins in order to spare the floor. When the weights are below 100kg or so it’s fine just using rubber mats (I’ve got a few rubber doormats lying around) to keep the weights off the ground (and to deaden the noise a little - keep the neighbours happy), but the heavier weights really need the pins. I just do all the lifts from the pins in order to keep in some sort of rhythm.

Think you’re right about the Good Mornings. The range of motion didn’t feel that small at the time, but on the video they’re quite brief. Will have to work on that.

I’m sure there’s a more efficient way of knocking up a workout video. Currently I’m using a Minolta DiMAGE Xt (Minolta’s weird capitalisation, not mine) which exports video in Quicktime .mov format. Using Quicktime I trim and export the clips as .avi, then put them together (complete with mp3 soundtrack) in Windows Movie Maker. This lets me export to .wmv format, which seems to be fairly common.

I seem to recall you posting some time ago regarding the file formats you found the most linux-friendly (regarding video editing), but a quick wander through your site archives didn’t uncover it. Ever played with the search functionality in Movable Type? :)

Posted by: Scott | October 25, 2004 11:29 PM

3

My thoughts at the time:

“Since Windows Media Video 9 (WMV) currently gives the best tradeoff between quality and file size, I have somewhat grudgingly settled for that, but only because it now also runs on Unix/Linux systems thanks to the great MPlayer (also the base for the Movix distribution, which creates self-contained video CDs… but I digress).”
http://tsampa.org/training/blog/archives/200312/index.php#000114

I still don’t feel entirely comfortable with using wmw, but since nearly 90% of my users this year are browsing in at tsampa.org on a Windows system it is a logical choice: they can just click on the clip and it starts playing. With DivX et al. you still need to grab the codec. On Linux playing wmv’s is no problem at all. Never got any complaints about the clips which tells me it has been a good choice.

Am in the process of moving tsampa.org to a new server and in the process I will migrate the blog to WordPress. Nifty search follows in the process. If I can also make a gentle request it would be the return of the preview button. It makes it easier to proof read comments and see if certain html tags are allowed or not (didn’t dare try a blockquote above).

Posted by: Kris | October 26, 2004 11:46 AM

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