Deadlift Stiffness (Taleb)

[Jason Donaldson]

Being self-taught deeply in multiple areas, he does seem to miss the mark with remarkable confidence from time to time, as well. Power cleans over deadlifts appears to be one of them.

Where did he even say that? I remember him responding to someone on Twitter he still deadlifts.

I was responding to the original post:

Nassim Taleb told switched from deadlifts to cleans because deadlifting causes stiffness. I have also been doing that to avoid stiffness and injury. Does anyone else agree?

FWIW, we both do presses. Taleb bikes, and I bike and row for low-impact aerobics. We need long-term sustainable programs.

If he hasn't really switched from DLs to PCs, then I'm glad to hear that the OP was incorrect. However, Shiva did add this:

Apparently Taleb is deathly concerned about arterial stiffness.

How he weights different inputs is what I think people are challenging here.

I lack the statistics-fu to fully understand the studies and their limitations, but I trust Taleb to know what he's doing. I'd love to talk at length with him about the topic or have him write up his findings somewhere so I can better understand what he's trying to say and why. I suppose that talking it up or down further without more information from him is useless.

FWIW, he recently retweeted https://twitter.com/MohammedAlo/stat...59759413874773, which summarizes the findings of Combined association of aerobic and muscle strengthening activity with mortality in individuals with hypertension | Hypertension Research:



I mean, that sounds sensible and we probably knew that already. All in all I suspect that Taleb is going in the right direction.

If the takeaway is that it's good to train both strength training and conditioning, then I don't think anyone is disagreeing. Some of the weirdness about arterial stiffening, and conclusions about percentage of training time spent in one mode vs. the other (when basically all studies get very basic things wrong about those modalities from the start) is what is mostly being challenged here. Taleb is great at statistical mathematics, but if the inputs and assumptions are flawed, then the results will be, too.