Plague of Strength

Q: “I just wanted to know what you thought of all those articles about how deadlifts can hurt your lower back in the long run. I can’t believe this after reading your blog, but do you think there is any truth in the fact that deadlifts fuck up your back?”

Interesting question that will have a fairly qualified answer.  Do I think I could ever fuck up my lower back deadlifting?  Not a fucking chance in hell.  Of all of the injuries I might one day suffer, lower back problems are about as likely as me wearing short shorts and those godawful Crossfit socks.   The reason for this is that I train insanely heavy constantly, and I never, ever wear a belt.  This means that my lower back has strengthened itself to accommodate the poundages I lift, and has grown even stronger with the ultra-heavy partials I do.  I could take a gunshot from a small caliber firearm in the spinal erectors and walk away laughing.

For the average weekend warrior fuckface who sits on padded machines fucking around for a half hour in the gym a couple of times a week?  He’s damn near guaranteed to fuck his back up completely.  The reason for this is that he’s a terrible decision maker and has a job that involves sitting.  Likewise for the chicks with office jobs who go to the gym and run on the treadmill all day long.  There’s a reason why both of those populations are stoop-shoulders and bereft off asses- they have shitty posture when sitting and standing, which overstretches their lower backs and tightens their hip flexors, and they sit all fucking day long.  They take the elevator up a couple of flights of stairs instead of walking up them like anyone with a modicum of fucking pride or interest in maintaining a body anyone on Earth wants to see naked.  That shit drives me directly up the fucking wall and makes me want to line those fat fucks up against said wall and hose them down with a bit of lead, and then put them through a wood chipper so as to make their corpses easier for wild pigs to eat.  Anyway, they then exacerbate this condition by going to the gym for more sitting, and then doing cardio on a machine that pulls their feet back for them, taking their posterior chain out of the equation, tightening their hip flexors further, and exponentially increasing the chances of a lower back catastrophe.  To make matters even worse, it’s always those fucking retards who spend 30 minutes a day doing abs, as though exercising that bodypart will turn them into modern-day Dumbledores who can magically melt off their beer gut with some fantastical incantation and make them look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.  They’ll hurt themselves deadlifting, on the off-chance they ever try to, because they’re fucking retarded.

Therefore, your question’s pretty much akin to asking “Hey, I’ve read a lot of articles that say that blind people will turn themselves into a fucking street pizza if they ride motorcycles.  What do you think about riding motorcycles?”  I think any blind person dumb enough to try to pilot a motorcycle deserves to die, and I’ll laugh my fucking ass off when weekend warriors in the gym hurt themselves deadlifting.  Does that answer your question?  In essence- if you are awesome, you will not hurt your lower back, as being awesome confers invulnerability to lower back issues.  If you suck at life and have given up on appearing human anyway, you’re guaranteed to hurt your lower back deadlifting and deserve to be mocked as you roll by on your Rascal thereafter.

Q: “You round your back while deadlifting!  I heard that this causes paralysis/AIDS/ebola/ugliness/or possibly infertility.  Why would you do this?”

First, see the above answer.  Second, round back lifting is actually pretty natural, and most big pullers round their backs on maximum efforts anyways.  Benni and Bolton both round their backs, for instance.  Should you aim to have a round back?  Probably not.  Generally speaking, you should arch your back to put yourself in a more mechanically advantageous position whenever possible, and because there’s no reason to actively taunt fate.

Brooks Kubik, however, has a different take.  In Dinosaur Training, for instance, he had the following to say about lifting with a round back:

backlifting with a barbell. It is this type of lifting that truly develops a strong back…” Jesse’s insight is a keen one. To prove its validity, all you have to do is spend a couple of months using heavy sandbags and heavy barrels as a regular part of your heavy training. You will find that the bags and barrels substantially increase your back strength, with a resulting carry-over to all conventional barbell movements and all athletic endeavors. If you are an athlete – particularly a wrestler or football player – round back lifting will build your back in exactly the manner it needs to be developed to battle a human opponent on the mat or on the playing field.  (Kubik, 99)

Thus, according to Brooks, you quite literally cannot get super-strong without lifting with a round back.  I will give him this- it’s fucking impossible to pick up oddly shaped objects with a flat back, and all stone lifters have huge backs and lift rounded ever fucking time.  Food for thought.

Q: “How did your back feel while you were deadlifting in competition? Does the pain come up right away? What kind of rehab have you done for it by the way? When you do squats, do you ever feel similar back pain/cramping?”

A: First, to clarify, I have no lower back issues.  The cramping to which this question refers occurs in my upper back, and is (insofar as I can tell) due to my penchant for using my upper back and traps on everything I do in the gym.  I had no cramping in the competition at all.  Cramping usually occurs for me due to lack of massage and a lot of near-max singles on deadlifts.  As for rehab, I covered it in this blog, but I essentially took a shitload of hot baths (as I had no access to a hot tub) and ground out all of my knots with a Theracane.  It was ridiculously painful, but it helped a lot.  I’d basically just sit on the couch and watch a movie while using the theracane the entire time.  It’d leave me bruised, but it got the knots out.

I never feel the cramping on back squats, but I will on front squats if I do them the day after deadlifting.  To my knowledge, this problem is fairly unique to me, but it’s possible that others on Earth might have that happen from time to time.  Mine started occurring because I spent the better part of a year doing a once a week workout of deadlifts to max, rack deads to max, suitcase deads to max, and two finger deads to max, followed by shrugs, and did this until I was quite literally crippled.  It was fucking stupid.  Fun, but stupid.

Q: “After seeing you list the push/press in your top-five lifts, and me trying them, I have since wondered why so many “professional coaches/trainers” don’t put more (any?) emphasis on them.”

That’s a damn good question.  I assume you’re referring to the behind the neck push press, which I know for a fact Olympic lifters use on a regular basis.  I’d imagine they do it to insulate themselves from a lawsuit.  I don’t bother with that bullshit, however, because I’m not rich enough to sue and I’d happily cut the throat of any idiot who felt like sending me a summons.  Mariusz does them, which got me doing them, and I love them and saw my shoulders grow by leaps and bounds, so I recommend them to you people.

Q: “Practically all of the test boosters you’ve recommended are off the market.  What the fuck?”

Blame the government.  They’ve started targeting all of the supplement companies that had been making grey-market supplements and raiding them, in addition to raiding stores that sold them.  Why?  They’ve managed to get their limp dicks hard over the idea of stripping you of one more way to combat the the festival of estrogens they’ve happily prepared for you (for a bit on that, go here, and here)  Why would they do this?  Probably because having more testosterone in your body would make it far harder for you to control, due to the fact that you’d be more physically powerful, less apt to take direction, and less physically intimidated by law enforcement agents.  Yeah, yeah, make all of the comments you want about tinfoil hats- there’s no other plausible explanation for removing these products from the market.  In any event, most of the shit out there was based on Balco’s products, and the M-Drol clones and other awesome test boosters are now a thing of the past.

Methyl Mass, which was formerly fucking amazing, is now a big bag of bullshit.  They’ve reformulated it to include an anti-cortisol agent and an anti-estrogen, which while better than nothing isn’t worth spending any considerable amount of money.  This saddens me, as I fell in love with that stuff a couple of years ago and was looking forward to grabbing some more until I noticed the change in formula.

Someone mentioned T-Bomb-II as being the purported shit to me the other day, but a quick glance at that shows that it’s nothing more than the Tribulus/Longjax stack that I recommended a while back, only with less potency.  As such, I just recommend taking 4 grams of Tribulus and any kitchen sink test supplement, and you should be good to go, at least for having sick hardons and blowing big loads.  Frankly, I’ve never been enamored with MHP, as they push soy to men, and this product is pretty expensive for what you get.  Given that you can get far more awesome out of less money (~$42 for T-Bomb vs ~$38 for the stack I recommended).  Girls, I’ve got nothing for you- I think all of the Tren knockoffs are off the market as well.

Q: “I can’t figure out why my lifts are stalling.  My diet’s perfect and I’m killing it in the gym.  The only thing is, I don’t think I’m getting as much sleep as I should.  What do you think?”

I’ve blogged at some length about the importance of sleep, but for some reason, you guys think it’s optional.  It’s not.  Sleep is one of the keystones of training success, and you’ll ignore it at your ultimate fucking peril. According to Rob Faigin, “sleep is particularly important to athletes and others engaged in physical training because it helps stave-off overtraining syndrome, marked by elevated cortisol levels.  The same volume of exercise that will produce and overtrained state in a sleep-deprived athlete might not in a well-rested athlete.  Athlete or not, adequate nighttime sleep is vital to optimizing hormone levels.”(Faigin, 200)  Paul Chek agrees completely, and states that the body’s physical repair occurs, no matter what time you go to sleep, between 10PM and 2AM, due to your body’s natural circadian rhythms and the affect of daylight.  As such, if you go to bed at 12AM, you’ve already missed 2 hours of physical repair.(Chek 203)  That’s fucking retarded if your goal is to gain muscle.  From everything I’ve read, the average person (i.e. completely detrained sack of dogshit) requires 7-8 hours of sleep, while people in the paleolithic slept considerably more.  If you’re training hard, wouldn’t you think you’d tend toward the paleolithic requirement than the Doritos eater?  I thought so.  Fuck Edison and get the fuck off your Facebook.  Sleep more and you’ll lift more, guaranteed.

Q: “When are you going to post more vids?”

Soon.  Very soon.  I generally dislike bringing a camera to the gym, which I realize runs counter to the trend of putting every single one of a person’s workouts online for no particular reason, but I’ve got a couple of new exercises to show you guys and a Gorillapod to test out.

Facebook less.  Lift more.  That is all.

Sources:
Chek, Paul.  How To Eat, Move, And Be Healthy.  2004.
Faigin, Rob.  Natural Hormonal Enhancement.  2000.