Last weekend I posted a personal record 1,509 pound total with PR’s in each lift. That's an improvement of 104 pounds in eleven months. I’m partly disappointed because none of my attempts were close to true maxes -- everything was relatively easy. But this means training went extremely well and I’m on the right path to bigger numbers. Thinking about the things that made the biggest impact on each of the individual competition lifts, here are the training lifts that contributed the most to the performance of both myself and my training partners:
1. Box Squat: there’s only one way to do a box squat, and I wasn’t doing them properly prior to my last meet. A properly executed box squat entails controlling the descent all the way down to the box, completely relaxing the hips while sitting on the box, then arching the upper back while driving from the hips straight up off the box. Squatting to a proper box height, especially for dynamic effort work, is crucial as well.
Along with depth is the way you initiate your ascent from the box. My dynamic effort weight leading up to the November meet was far too heavy, and I got in the habit of using the box as a means of popping myself up rather than using my hips and hamstrings. This made for an incredibly weak bottom position once the box was removed, and I had no power out of the hole at my last meet. From an outside observer’s perspective, you’ll usually see one of two things happen when the lifter is using the box itself to initiate their ascent:
i) The box rocks or slides when the lifter comes off the box — this is an obvious sign they are pushing off the box rather than away from it.
ii) Less common but still detrimental to squatting strength is using the whip of the bar to initiate the descent. The lifter will jerk or bounce slightly just before the ascent which creates an oscillation of the bar. While this is proper technique for initiating a jerk or getting unstuck out of the bottom of a heavy clean, this will not build the hip power required to drive up a heavy squat.
2. Pin Press: Bench presses from the pins ingrained in me a valuable piece of bench technique: push yourself through the bench rather than pushing the bar away from you. This gives you a stronger foundation for pushing through heavy attempts, helps keep the shoulder blades retracted, and allows you to get more drive from the triceps. Without the stretch reflex, the only way to push through a heavy pin press is to fully drive yourself through the bench itself to get that heavy dead weight off the pins with enough momentum to reach lockout. We used pins of various heights working up to singles for max effort work, and we rotated between high pin presses and board presses as supplemental work after dynamic effort bench. Along with different heights we varied our grip widths.
3. Good Morning: the greatest contributing factor to building my deadlift has been prioritizing the good morning as both a max effort movement and an accessory exercise. All kinds of varieties, especially with the safety squat bar and cambered bar, narrow stance and wide, out of the rack and from the pins, have helped immensely after neglecting this lift for the majority of my training career. No other lift has built the strength of my entire back, abdominals, and hamstrings like good mornings. Like the box squat, you must be honest with yourself about technique in order to maximize the training effect. Even on max effort work, we aim to get the torso close to parallel to the floor with the bar clearly ahead of the knees through the majority of the movement. This will limit the weight used in the short-term but will yield greater carryover to the deadlift and squat which is the primary objective here.
A few general programming notes:
We followed the old Westside standard for max effort lower movement selection: 60% good mornings, 30% squats, 10% deadlifts.
Assistance work for the upper body focused primarily on triceps and lats.
Assistance work for the lower body focused primarily on hamstrings and abs.
For accountability, motivation, and spotting, get some solid training partners.
