Brick wall on deadlifts came out of nowhere

[heinz83]

Have you considered keeping your recovery time more consistent? Heavy deadlifts on 7 days rest feel different than 10 days rest, at least to me. Also, why are you doing 10-12 sets of chins?

[gv3055]

Well…

Recovery is a challenge at 48 y.o., what can I say. This assessment is not a result of laziness, I assure you, it came with a lot of trial and error using myself as the test subject .
Sometimes us old farts need an additional day to recover from heavy training. I have come to the realization that I am not 25 anymore.

Usually only 2 days after an intense workout I cannot even move again properly, let alone think about training again!
I find training every 3rd day with a total of 3 big compound exercises is about my sweet spot.

I guess I don't see the big problem here (at least to me it is not as obvious as your 'well...' comment would suggest).
My frequency per body part, so to speak, is still 2-3 times per week.

Anyway I am open to change this and/or make adjustments to allow more frequent training (maybe HLM will help in this regard, as all three exercises per session being heavy 5 RM 3x5 was getting very taxing).
That's another reason I am re-reading Practical Programming.

[Jovan Dragisic]

I guess I don't see the big problem here (at least to me it is not as obvious as your 'well...' comment would suggest).
My frequency per body part, so to speak, is still 2-3 times per week.

I think the grey book has a chapter on an HLM one day on, two days off setup. My comment was meant to say that deviating from the established routines will lead to stalls sooner than you would expect. You probably need to switch things around a little and maybe not expect workout to workout progress.

[Maybach]

My frequency per body part, so to speak, is still 2-3 times per week.

No, it isn't. Chins are not a pull. They are a pull in a colloquial sense, but "pulling" which contributes to the deadlift is the clean, the snatch, and deadlift variations. You are only doing that once a week, which notably is less than the NLP ever proscribes: late stage novices are pulling 1.5 times a week. They are effectively doing intermediate programming for the deadlift on a ten day cycle. And this stage seldom lasts very long. Maybe 8 weeks for a very gifted deadlifter? You have effectively moved your pulling to the "one lift a week" model detailed in PPST, but are not lifting heavy enough to justify such a low frequency.

This is a classic error, up there with the "I'm stalled on the squat and my deadlift is five pounds behind." You omitted the power clean and replaced it with *nothing.* Intermediacy means stress needs to be accumulated across multiple workouts. My general picture is that the transition from novice to intermediate is driven less by fatigue requirements (which trainees are especially able to perceive) and more by stress requirements. It's not (or rather, not merely) that you need to drop the frequency of truly heavy sets down to once weekly because you can't recover from them, but that a single workout is no longer perceived by the body as sufficient stimulus to drive an adaptation. If lifting a heavy weight once were all it took to drive adaptation to its limit, then programming would get simpler with training advancement, not more complex. Just add days in between workouts, and continue the novice progression until you can only do the workouts once a month. Football coaches would be delighted. The intermediate regime is the beginning of a somewhat supraphysiological situation, where the technological ingenuity of the human mind needs to be applied to "trick" the adaptive mechanism of the human body to create adaptations in excess of its capacity to react to immediate stimulus. Lighter weight "volume" work, done for a lighter weight solely to ensure the work can be performed and recovered from, and done with some adjustment to allow for the lighter weight to be perceived as a force production stress, accomplishes this. The body is no longer marshalling adaptive capacity to the task of, what, to it, appears as an isolated event (which has limited adaptive potential. Lifting a car off of someone in the heat of adrenaline does not mean you can deadlift the weight of that car plus five pounds if you walk into the gym the next week), but rather to an environment in which lifting things off the ground happens regularly. The power clean is probably the perfect "underloaded pull", but in absence of that you need like, RDLs, SLDLs, SGDLs, or SOMETHING to actually get your body to think "this is what we do now" and not "I hope that doesn't happen again." Your body at the end of novice programming thinks it's "strong enough" for the isolated stresses of an individual workout. You need to convince it otherwise. Best case? Learn the damn clean. Second best case? Pull *something* off the ground twice a week. The "volume" work needs to be heavy relatively, but light enough in the absolute that it doesn't provide a big recovery impingement.

Question: What provides more lat work, a concentric/eccentric bodyweight chinup, or an isometric lat in a 405 deadlift?

The napkin math might give it to the chin up. Deflecting the plumb hanging 405 lbs about 15 degrees requires about 100 pounds of force, whereas the arm carried through its whole range of motion on the chin up might have to apply a full 200 pounds of force, at least at the bottom before the moment arm is shortened. Either way, I'm not sure it's a productive distinction. Designations of which lift is the primary "driver" while one is the "passenger" based on apportionment of stress seems less than useful, especially for an intermediate, who needs to be applying stress over multiple workouts. As I implied, the chin up might be the least contributive of exercises that are meant to "assist" the deadlift: it produces stress on the musculature on around the same order as all the other big lifts, and perhaps even less.

[Johnsonville]

I’ve had a similar situation in the past a long time ago. I did 400 for 3 and couldn’t budge 405 the next deadlift session. I did a big deload (mistake in my opinion) and never got back to that weight for another year. One thing you could try is running out your deadlifts. One week a set of five, next week a set of three, week after a single or double, then start the cycle over at a higher weight. I don’t know much about your situation, but that has gotten me past a hard plateau before

[gv3055]

Thanks again for all the helpful comments and suggestions in this thread!
Not to brown nose or anything, but you guys are smart!

My key takeaways so far, please feel free to correct if I have misinterpreted:

1.
Deadlifting once per week or even once per 10 days is not in line with my current level of progression (measured by weight on the bar compared to my gender, bodyweight etc.). I cannot expect to progress every workout on the deadlift forever without adding in some added stress on off days (the replaced cleans with *nothing* comment makes sense and really hit home).
Adding in a lighter (not light) pull, at least in between Deadlift sessions, could help my progress because it adds weekly stress as opposed to hindering it by reducing my ability to recover from the heavy day. I am thinking about either RDLs, Snatch-grip Deadlifts, or Deficit Deadlifts here since they mimic Deadlifts more than most other pulls (and as I mentioned, I am not built for power cleans, although I digress and will admit that they are great!). I guess which pull I do is not the most important takeaway, but doing something is!

2.
Chins are not really accomplishing a whole lot for me in the way of improving my deadlift, however I think we would all agree that as a heavier guy they are probably not completely useless in the grand scheme of things either (it is also the only thing I ever do for my biceps, so I prefer to keep these in there somehow, some way). I am thinking about moving a couple sets of these (which means 5-7 as I cannot do more than this anyway) to the same day and do them after my deadlifts, where they are least likely to interfere with recovery. Or is this logic flawed?

Thanks again guys!

I think the grey book has a chapter on an HLM one day on, two days off setup. My comment was meant to say that deviating from the established routines will lead to stalls sooner than you would expect. You probably need to switch things around a little and maybe not expect workout to workout progress.

makes perfect sense, thank you again!

[gv3055]

Quick update for anyone following this thread:

this morning I decided to try to DL the 165 kg again (before I have added any accessories yet) and today for some reason I hit it for a relatively easy triple.

Go figure.

Anyway after my holiday starting next week (will be my first 8 day rest so maybe it will do some good) I will add in the light and medium days for my pulling as we discussed in this thread and try to keep driving the DL up.

[gv3055]

quick question:

with the deficit or snatch grip deadlifts, am I still aiming to do one work set of 5 in a session, or should it be 3 sets of 5 since these are inherently a lighter pull than the conventional DL?

Thx.

[gv3055]

quick question:

with the deficit or snatch grip deadlifts, am I still aiming to do one work set of 5 in a session, or should it be 3 sets of 5 since these are inherently a lighter pull than the conventional DL?

Thx.

since there are no takers, I will compromise in the middle and do 2 sets of snatch-grip deadlifts on Fridays.