A case study of @cheaterlifter deadlift working with JJ @lift_ng
Jing Yi had was struggling at lockout with his deadlift and it wasn’t necessarily that he was losing back position off the floor, but rather the fact that Jing Yi had a misunderstanding of how the sumo deadlift was meant to be executed; namely instead of using his legs, especially his quads to break the floor, he would try getting the hips close and wedging the bar up by trying to “knees out” and get the hips close.
This makes his deadlift look “good” in the sense of being upright with a “nice” shoulder over the bar position. However, this is not necessarily the goal of the sumo deadlift as it has a tendency of taking a lifter off their legs, discounting the use of a big prime mover of the sumo.
Nonetheless, Jing Yi’s sumo was a loadable pattern that could handle some work. Understanding his “natural efficiency” combined with the fact that he needed some technical adjustments, we decided that it would make sense for him to do a block where his primary deadlift would be a paused sumo to reinforce proper loading of his quads off the floor. This also allows him to continue to build some capacity without having to strip him back to intensities that don’t see a close resemblance to max strength on the deadlift.
Approaching the problem with more specificity can be counter-productive as it would cause Jing Yi to load the bar too aggressively and fall back into old movement patterns.
Jing Yi eventually hit a 240Kg PR in a deload week despite having not pulled a competition style sumo in 10 weeks. Note that 240 was loaded to match the planned RPE based on how warm-ups were moving and not to force a PR where it wasn’t earned.
Video 1: Week 10 Deload 240@6
Video 2: Week 9 Paused 230x3@8.5
Vid 3: Best pull @ 230 before working with JJ