This is part two of a two-part series.
MK: Among the videos we have looked at are Naim Suleymanoglu’s snatches and clean and jerks. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVH0H0Dbpro) You’ve observed a very interesting compensatory sequence that he engages in before beginning his pulls.
MR: What you’ll see is that he takes about two or three pulses of pull in order to get his weight from his toes back onto the middle of his foot before the bar leaves the ground. In other words, he’s using those little tugs to pull the slack out of his hamstrings after he sets his lumbar spine. That’s essentially what’s going on. What you find is that good lifters are people who are very good at reproducing that complex sequence of events. They know how to do it because this is the way they have done it for fifteen years, and this is what feels right. Those people aren’t who I’m concerned with. I’m not concerned with experienced lifters who have gotten used to doing it a bit inefficiently. It’s not inefficient for them because they’re able to deal with the inefficiency and predict it and control it. That’s not who I deal with—I deal with people who don’t know how to do this stuff.
When I teach people how to pull, what I’m trying to do is teach novice lifters the easiest way for them to produce a pull according to that standard model. So what we do is we place the middle of the foot under the bar where the system will be in equilibrium. In doing so, we therefore take out a lot of the variability that would occur were the bar to be pulled from a slightly different point on the floor every single time and then the variability involved in getting it back over the middle of the foot during the first part of the pull. My method is a way for people who have either had trouble doing it or have never done it before to do it correctly the first time according to what I have observed to be the standard model for pulling heavy weights off the floor.
Now, you can attempt to pull the bar off the ground anywhere you want to. My point in this whole discussion is that the bar is going to be in equilibrium when it is directly under the scapulas and when it’s directly over the middle of the foot. That means the lighter the weight you’re pulling, the more likely you are to be able to get away with doing it inefficiently. The heavier the weight that you’re pulling, the more the mechanics of the system are going to require that you be in that position. And there’s a continuum between light weight and heavy weight that exhibits these characteristics.
MK: When we looked at Brad Gillingham’s deadlifts from the 2007 IPF Worlds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a4o6BSWwl4) and the 2008 Arnold Classic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhsr6hImWnA), you described his technique as “the most perfect one I’ve seen.” Please explain.
MR: What most powerlifters do is they place the middle of the foot under the bar. They don’t drop forward, and they don’t rock forward. Gillingham does this perfectly. What he does is he puts the middle of his foot under the bar, turns his toes out a little, and places his knees in the position where he wants them. Then, he squeezes his chest up and gets the lumbar into extension right before he pulls the bar off the floor while the hamstrings are already tight.
MK: Turning to Ed Coan's 837-lb deadlift at the 1996s IPF Worlds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMGnd2_CrD0), what are your observations?
MR: If you stop the video at 33 seconds, you'll see that Ed gets in a position where his arms are vertical and his back angle is in a more vertical position than when the bar actually starts off the ground. This places the scapulas behind the bar. When the plates break off the ground at 34 seconds, you can clearly see that the back has assumed an angle that places the scapulas directly over the bar and that this back angle is maintained until the bar gets to the knees.
The movement that occurs prior to the bar actually leaving the ground—the movement that produced the change in the back angle—was unnecessary in terms of its contribution to the pull because you can clearly see that the pull begins in exactly the same place that the standard pulling model predicts it will. The difference is where does Ed think he starts his pull versus where the bar actually leaves the ground? My point here is that it’s possible to just place the bar in a position over the middle of the foot and assume the start position in such a way that the back angle is in the same position that it’s in at 34 seconds so there isn’t any motion that adjusts the back angle before the bar leaves the ground. This is like Brad Gillingham’s pulls.
But here’s an interesting observation. Where is evidence of absolute strength in a snatch or a clean? It is at the instant that the bar leaves the ground because speed-strength does not come into play until the pull accelerates, which means upstream from breaking the bar off the ground as the bar accelerates into a velocity that gives it a momentum component. It's only after that point that speed-strength is a factor. However, breaking it off the ground is a function of your absolute strength, your ability to break the bar loose from a dead stop, and to hold your position over the bar isometrically until the second pull starts. The stronger you are, the lighter that snatch and clean will be relative to your absolute strength and the more weight you can get off the floor in the proper position to accelerate.
You accelerate both a clean and a snatch. You don’t accelerate a deadlift, at least not appreciably. But the instant at which the bar leaves the ground is the point at which your absolute strength is the major factor in Olympic weightlifting. And the higher your absolute strength relative to the load you're pulling in the snatch and the clean, the more likely you're able to evidence an inefficient technical pull off the ground. You can get away with it if it's light. This is part of the continuum I was talking about earlier.
MK: Coan’s pulling style is the strongest example of Ernie Frantz’s idea of “the Frantz Rocker.” As he describes it in The Ten Commandments of Powerlifting, “…keep your head up and rock forward then quickly go back into a full squat and blast upward. Your momentum will practically lift the weight by itself. All you have to do is keep your shoulders back, head up, and drag the bar across your shins up to your thighs.” This advice suggests that the stretch reflex in the squat can be duplicated in the deadlift.
MR: There’s a stretch reflex in the squat because it's loaded. In the squat, the load is the bar on your back eccentrically lowered causing a loaded bounce out of the hole that not only is a stretch reflex but is also elastic energy stored during the eccentric phase of the movement in the extensible components of the muscles and tendons of the hips and legs. This is in direct contrast to the lowering and raising of your naked ass over the barbell without any contribution from any eccentric anything. So the two situations are not equivalent examples of the use of the stretch reflex.
MK: Who taught you how to deadlift?
MR: I learned how to deadlift from Bill Starr, but he never analyzed it at this level. For that matter, I hadn’t either until about two or three years ago. I just knew where the bar needed to be, but I didn’t know why. I got to thinking about it because we would start having arguments about it. “I think we need to pull with our backs more vertical.” “Well, no, we don’t, and I can’t tell you why right now, but I’ll get to where I can.” And so I did. I just started thinking about it. Why do we pull this way? Why does the bar want to be in this position?
And it just dawned on me one night in August of 2006 while I was talking to Dr. Barry Prestridge, one of my members here at the Wichita Falls Athletic Club. It was one of these slap yourself in the forehead things. It’s the scapulas. The scapulas are over the bar. Look at the anatomy of the traps and the rhomboids. Look at the position that the scapulas are in to receive the force transmitted up the spine. It’s right there in front of you. That is the structure that receives the force transmitted across those broad muscles isometrically and then down the arms to the bar. That’s it. Just look at the anatomy.
The trapezius has the broadest muscle origin in the human body. It goes all the way from the base of the skull down to T12. It receives the force that the rigid spine transmits, the force generated by the muscles that open the knees and the hips. That force is then transmitted across the traps and the rhomboids to the scapulas. What hangs from the scapulas? The arms. And then if you’ll look at it, every single time you see somebody pulling a heavy bar off the floor—every single time—it’s the scapula that is plumb to the bar, not the arms. Why would that be? Because the scapula is the thing below which the bar hangs. The tensional force of the weight in the hands is transmitted between the scapulas and the grip by the muscles, ligaments, and tendons that anchor the bones in place isometrically. The traps and rhomboids transfer the force to the scapulas; the triceps, biceps, forearm muscles, grip muscles, and the ligaments and tendons form the chain from which the weight hangs; and the lats act on the humerus to keep the arms at the angle they have to be to place the load directly under the scapulas.
But you have to remember that the bar is hanging from the scapulas and therefore the force is tension. The bony skeleton doesn’t transmit tension. It only transmits compression. It is the connective tissue components that transmit tension. So you have to look at the connective tissue components of the arms and the structures that suspend the arms to see exactly how that force is transmitted.
MK: It seems our anatomy is telling us what it wants us to do if we only respect it.
MR: That’s exactly right. This stuff is merely the normal physical expression of muscular force transmitted through skeletal anatomy. That’s the way the skeleton moves the bar when the muscles generate enough force to do it. It’s the way the skeleton operates. And it’s important to know this because it determines the best way to teach people how to train with barbells. That’s really what we’re trying to do.
Myles Kantor is a personal trainer and powerlifter from Boynton Beach, Florida. He has competed in the APF and USAPL.