Chapter 2: Lifting Through the Eccentric Phase
Mark Brown
March 2, 2022
Deadlifts are done as part of game time and practice time for lifters. What that means is that there is different ways to approach training deadlifts. When done in competitions or to practice for competitions, usually only the concentric part of the lift is done. That is the part of the lift that is completed from the floor all the way up to the locked out position at the hips. For powerlifters, it has to be one complete motion from floor to the hip. Strongman competitors are allowed to hitch in order to lock out the lift at the top. What’s this entry is about is something that I see at the gym almost on a daily basis and it confuses me. I understand training deadlifts for competition, what I don’t get is why people slam the bar back down to the floor after completing a rep or dropping the bar. It completely eliminates the eccentric part of the lift, which is a major hamstring builder. The biggest part of it that confuses me is that there’s not much to do but simply resist gravity and move the body so it doesn’t get contorted in the process of doing so. I don’t think I will get to the bottom of this by the end of the entry but I just want to say that it’s ok to lower the bar back to the ground slowly.
Deadlifts in whatever form I do them are a major part of my leg development plan. I noticed years ago that my hamstrings were far weaker than they should have been. Now I realize that the lack of hamstring development is what was holding my squat back for so long. Romanian deadlifts are my first choice for a hamstring focused lift day. I have found that sumo deadlifts also have a similar effect so I have done at them recently while lifting in the gym rather than the garage. For me, that means every deadlift that I do involves doing the whole lift from the floor up to the locked out position at the hip then back down to the floor resisting gravity on the way to get as much out of the lift as possible. I do this with just about every lift that I do. In that way, I think of the lift as a bodybuilder rather than a powerlifter, who is only concerned about the rep success at the top. I believe it has definitely had a major impact on leg strength development over the last 8 weeks in addition to the shift in my plan to produce more workload through decreasing the rest time between sets down to 2 minutes.
Since their return to my core plan in June 2020, I have done squats before deadlifts. Part of that I found squats to be a harder lift so I wanted to do them when I was fresher. That hasn’t changed over the last year and a half. What has happened is that my ability to squat heavier weight over that time period has gone up with consistently heavy squat and deadlift work. I have always been hesitant to lift into the 90% 1RM range at the gym for fear of failure there. That is mostly from the half and open racks available there. Now, I no real problem going to that range and in heavy volume to increase absolute power. I attribute a lot of that to doing every rep fully as I possible can. I even see dumbbell press as an opportunity to get in a deadlift rep. So it confuses me when I see people deadlifting and failing to lock out then acting like they completed the rep, dropping the bar after a completed lift, or slamming the bar down to bounce the bar off the ground to get another rep done. I do get concentrating on the concentric part of the lift because it is the part that gets judged. Touch and go deadlifts I understand because they are part of CrossFit competitions so they have to be practiced. What I don’t get is ignoring the eccentric part of the lift in the process.
Last year was the peak for my consumption of fitness media on Youtube. Even then it wasn’t as much as it could have easily been and what I consumed really wasn’t related to lifts but to performance enhancing drugs and their effects mostly. I still do watch some lifting based videos here and there but it mostly on Dave Tate’s EliteFTS channel. I am more powerlifter than anything else, after all. I am very familiar with the bar dropping at competitions like World’s Strongest Man and Strongman based deadlift competitions. I’ve never thought to do it in the gym for the reasons already stated and one moment that always sticks out in my mind. Eddie Hall’s drop of a 461 kg deadlift at the 2014 Europe’s Strongest Man contest prevented him from setting the world record. It’s a stunning video to watch because of the way he has the record in his hands and drops it before he is given the good signal. I realize that I don’t do competitions so the same lessons don’t necessarily apply to me but the moment sticks with me as a lesson in doing whatever lift I’m doing fully. I have seen a lot of the hitches and bar dropping in the gym lately that leaves more questions than answers if the influence of Strongman is good or not on the deadlift. I cannot really comment on social media influencers, the ones who don’t compete, on the particular issue of lifting all the way through the eccentric phase of the lift because I don’t pay attention to that space on Youtube, Facebook, etc.
I know I didn’t break a ton of ground with this entry in the blog. I just wanted to give voice to something that I have seen and heard a lot of lately in the gym that has confused to hell out of me. Maybe that’s just the remnant of bodybuilder mentality that lives inside me coming through the powerlifter I like being. I would never actually say this to another lifter at the gym because it’s not my place to unsolicited critiques. I genuinely believe not putting effort into the eccentric phase of the deadlift is wasteful. I don’t have medically backed studies to show the benefit of resisting the bar back to the ground but I can say that it has significantly helped leg development in terms of power production and muscular development. One look at my logs over the last 8 weeks will show this. Resist the urge to only do the concentric part of the lift and it will help make gains in strength and muscular development.
Life Through Lifting 