The dead weight. The ego lift of the lower body. Large numbers and heavy weights can come up quite easily for most athletes when doing this lift. Like everything, with success comes haste and with haste comes downfalls in quality and diligence. For any athlete who uses the deadlift regularly, CrossFit, powerlifters, or traditional athletes, it’s a move that needs to be used with care. This article will talk about why you don’t need to deadlift for a max weight, its replacements, and specifically how this applies to CrossFit athletes.
Do not misunderstand. As a coach and athlete, I will argue that the deadlift is a very valuable strengthening tool for the posterior chain. Not many lifts use so many large muscles that allow us to lift such a large amount of weight. It’s not that unusual to see an athlete deadlifting for just a few months to get to the point where he can lift 1.5x or even 2x bodyweight and more. With more accessory training and time, a 3X bodyweight deadlift can be achieved for more highly trained and better trained athletes. For this and other reasons it is a lift that needs to be very often in the training cycles.
The reason I am wary of deadlifting, both in my own training and in the training of athletes I work with, is that it is extremely taxing when maximally trained, both CNS due to the sheer amount of weight being held, and on the posterior chain. With reference to the former, if an athlete is training at max (and at max refers to working a max weight for a 3-rep scheme or less) every week or more than once a week, they are most likely that the body is using drops more than it is worth, which greatly affects the following days of training. In reference to the latter, any coach or athlete who is relatively well schooled in strength training will tell you that training lifts to the max will sometimes cause a lifter to lose perfect form. Some coaches may even argue (me included) that it’s okay for him to lose form to some extent during a max lift because he trains the body to come out of a less than perfect lift safely and successfully. However, with the sheer amount of weight being lifted in the deadlift, less-than-perfect form can lead to tightness and pain in your lower back, hips, and hamstrings, and can even lead to injury. Like the problem with CNS taxes, this leads to athletes missing training days. No matter what sport you are training for, this is not good.
So what other options do we have?
The Soviets were onto something with their weightlifting studies back in the days of the Iron Curtain. The reason so much good information, not only about lifting but also about strength development in general, comes from that time is because they had such a large population participating in the sport of weightlifting. With so many people training for strength, Soviet trainers were able to develop very tried and true theories on how to get stronger by maintaining a very high level of volume every day.
The key ingredient: speed.
Speed is king. This philosophy has been adopted by training methods all over the world and in all different sports. Louie Simmons took this idea and created an entire training template based on moving the weight as fast as possible and keeping the muscles under tension during these high speed lifts. It has been proven time and time again that the best way to gain strength is to apply maximum force on a barbell as quickly as possible.
This speed is all relative. Obviously the speed at which you lift a squat that is your 1rm is going to be much slower than the speed at which you lift 50% of that on your dynamic squat days. But exerting as much force as possible to lift that weight is equivalent to moving a lighter weight with explosive speed, allowing you to tap into different motor units and different/larger muscles than a lighter load/slower lift. The important thing is the number of times you can activate these motor units.
The motor units are what make the muscle contract. It wants to lift something, the brain sends a signal to the muscle, the motor units fire, it makes the muscle contract, we lift it. However, their motor units are arranged from small to large. The smallest fire the easiest and first, the largest are the hardest to recruit and fire last. You may have guessed that smaller motor units are connected to smaller muscle fibers, while larger motor units are connected to larger muscle fibers. So what we have here is a neat little order that dictates how and when we access the largest muscles in our body. This is called the Henneman Size Principle. Use small motor units to lift sub-maximum loads and only take advantage of the larger motor units by lifting maximum loads…or lifting at maximum speed. Small motor units are more sustainable, meaning you can use them repeatedly more easily, while large motor units tire faster and take longer to recover. Remember this, later.
Think of it in terms of the fight or flight mentality. In the past, I’m talking about a long time ago, fight or flight meant being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or not being eaten. The peak of this fighting mentality is when you’re getting out of that cave faster than the tiger, or even ripping the tooth out of the tiger’s mouth and using it to kill the beast. It is at this peak that you are recruiting everything, including the largest motor units and muscles in your body. It’s how/why you can achieve strange feats of strength under pressure.
How do you simulate this situation during training? By causing your body to exert as much force and therefore speed as possible on a load. So let’s take a look at deadlifting. It takes a ton of force to lift a 500# 1RM, right? It may not be super fast, but you’ve definitely flipped that fight switch and gotten into those bigger motor units during the lift. So why not just lift a 1rm once a week?
Think about how often you can lift that 1RM deadlift in one session. Then think about how often you can lift it safely. This is where we get into efficiency of use. What Elwood Henneman discovered, the Soviets experimented with, and Louie Simmons applied is that we can get bigger and stronger by not just raising highs here and there, but raising sub-highs as fast as possible over and over again. If you can recruit the same large motor units that you do by doing a 1rm, the same ones that are connected to the biggest muscles in your body, by lifting 50-70% of that multiple times in one session, what do you think is more beneficial? to build strength? If you can tap into those large motor units/large muscles multiple, if not 10, times in a training session, you will train those nerves (motor units) to be able to fire more often without fatigue and therefore you will be able to train those muscles more. bigger/stronger more often.
For example, instead of lifting that 1RM deadlift weekly, think about doing Olympic lifts at varying percentages almost every day. Not only is this done to improve your Olympic lifts, but explosively pulling off the ground (exerting maximum strength and speed on a load) takes advantage of those larger motor units. While you may not always recruit the biggest and strongest, you are training him to take advantage of those larger units and muscle groups repetitively. Not only applicable to strength, but also specifically applicable to CrossFit. To perform at the highest level in this sport, you must be able to move the weight very quickly and over and over again. In other words, you need to be able to recruit those high-end motor units, the largest muscles in your body, over and over again. If you only train them once at a time, you train them to fire/recruit once at a time.
To replace the lack of heavy lifting, he also performs heavy but explosive pulls once a week. By putting more of your maximum load or snatch into your pulls and doing them as fast as you can, you’re taking advantage of larger, harder-to-reach motor units. By doing them for repetitions, you are forcing/training them to fire repetitively. So not only are you training yourself mentally to be able to pull heavier weight than ever before, you’re training yourself physically to actually be able to pull it off. This correlates with higher deadlifts because regardless of the load on the bar, you’re training the biggest, most powerful muscles in your body MULTIPLE TIMES per set, not just one at a time. Develop muscular strength and endurance in various ways.
Where Louie Simmons helped even more was by convincing the masses of the benefits of accommodating resistance. The bands and chains used for vertical lifts mean that even when using a submaximal weight, an athlete has to shoot through the entire lift. This is made possible by accommodation resistance which adds weight/resistance as the lift (usually) gets easier. Think top of the deadlift, bench, squat. This requires an athlete to be explosive not only during the hard “sticking point” of the lift but throughout the entire exercise, making the aforementioned high-level motor unit recruitment happen even with a “lighter” weight.
Note your speed on each lift. Lifting aggressively and quickly allows you to get stronger. You don’t have to always use a max load to get stronger using the above science. That’s why with The ProgramWOD and at CrossFit Lando we do squats with specific percentages and reps and why we do a lot of dynamic lifting. If you can move it faster, do it.
Elite athletes need to train efficiently. This not only refers to time, but also to the tension in the body. It doesn’t do an athlete any good to train on the ground or get injured. The goal is to be able to train at a high level all or most of the time. Deadlifting isn’t necessarily “bad” for you, but it certainly puts a strain on your CNS and causes a lot of pain and injury. If we can avoid this, why not do it? Of course, the stimulus of pulling a deadlift multiple times should still be used because it’s a very different and specific stimulus. But movements like dynamic pulls, box squats, and lighter adaptive-resistance deadlifts can be used in place of multiple days of max deadlifts in a training cycle. This allows an athlete to continuously build strength throughout training waves without taking extended time off due to exhaustion or injury.