Saturday 5.1: Back squat, deadlift

Saturday. Technique for deadlift. Workout 10-8-6-4-2 of back squats and deadlift. Mobility

Pauliina joined me in that training. Toni had a rest day. My plan was to concentrate on grinding my technique on the deadlift moves. I took some deadlift sets after a good and proper warm-up. As the main workout of the day I planned to go for a combination of squats and deadlifts with weights around 75% of my max loads.

Back extensions

Deadlift technique. One of the beasts at our Box threw me a link to T-Nation's web page where the guys are giving tips to good deadlift technique. I had to absorb the text and was anxious to try the five tips out as this is of the main focus areas for me in the first quarter of this year. I have troubles in keeping my chest up throughout the lift. Instead, my hip shoots up in the air first and that's why I have to pull the entire load with pure back muscles.

By completing the lift the way it's most efficient (leading with chest) I'd be able to utilize my legs and hip more. That would definitely result in me bringing more weights up. I took a few sets of 4 reps with 90-140kg. I feel my form was rather good up to 120kg but on 140kg I went back to my old routines of shooting the hip in the air first.

Workout. Back squat and deadlifts.

• 10-8-6-4-2
• Back squats, 100kg
• Deadlift, 120kg

My maxes are 135kg for back squat and 170kg for deadlift so these weights are about 75% of max loads. I didn't see it coming that my back would be on fire. I went unbroken for the first round of tens. Then I felt some pressure in my lower back and had to take a short break. The second set - eights - of back squats I took 4+4 and the pressure began to grow. After 8 unbroken deadlifts it started to become bigger than life. I have never had that kind of pressure in my back so I started to feel a bit worried. I still continued to rattle on with the weights for a set of 6 squats, in 3+3, then a set of 6 deadlifts. At this stage the pain in my back was simply too much. I took a single rep of squat and stopped there.

The reason I stopped was because I thought something might be wrong. After moaning for 5-10 minutes I felt good again. I talked to my bro who assured me it was caused by the combination of these two movements that both create burden in lower back. Now, after a couple hours of thinking about it, I don't feel as disappointed as I felt right after the workout because I understand it was due to my programming where I have to pay more attention to. If I knew it was only pain in the muscles, I would have probably moved on but I thought something might be wrong in my body so I had to stop, just 6 reps each before the end.

All in all, I got a high rep workout of two main movements, 24 reps each. I believe this day did good to my development as I got a lot of reps with rather heavy weights and I also got the chance to focus on my dl technique. In the end we took mobility, foam rolling and stretching with Pauliina.