Stalling on deadlift at pathetically weak weight. What is going on?
I apologize for a lengthy post, but I've tried watching videos, looking through the books, and reading through articles, so I figured I've ran into a unique situation.
Background: 28 year old male, 6'1.
Started program Apr 19 at 190 lb bodyweight, Squat 130, Bench 100, Overhead 70, Deadlift 135
Now today my bodyweight is 220 lb (about 10 lb is from creatine loading, rest is from clean bulking), Squat 240, Bench 180, Overhead 117.5, Deadlift is 275
To answer the three questions, I'm eating approx 4000 calories a day, sleeping about 7.5 hours a night, and was taking 10 lb jumps on Deadlift, 5 lb on Squat/Bench, and 2.5 lb on Overhead.
Now, you're probably wondering why my squat and deadlift is so low. I got my squat up to 230 on Jun 03. This was followed by intense tendonitis due to me loading my arms during the squat. I found a good coach who I got a one time session with. We dropped the weight to about 185 and did pause and tempo squats to figure out exactly what adjustments I needed to make. This worked well and I worked my way up from there. Today I squatted 240 with no issues and feel like I'll be able to add 5 lb for many months to come (same story with Bench/Overhead).
This brings me to my Deadlift issues. I obviously started at a very low weight, and Deadlifts really never felt challenging to me until I got my weight to 260 on Jun 03 (coincidentally the same day as my squat stall, not sure?). I couldn't pull it off the ground, I figured I stalled, and reduced my weight down to 245 and tried to build back up. I dropped Cleans and Chins out from my routine to focus on my Deadlift, but then ended up failing to break the bar from the floor at even lower weights. This spiraled for some time until I found the tip to pull for at least 5 seconds from one of the SS videos, and Robert Santana's artificially weak deadlift article, both which helped a bunch, and probably meant that my 260 stall wasn't a real stall.
From here I brought it up to 275 last week and got two reps in. I was too exhausted to continue another three reps and figured it was time to throw the Cleans/Chins day back in. So I did that and a week later (today Jul 09), I tried 275 again and only got three reps before running out of gas. I even tried to take a 10 minute break and go back to get a 2x3 set in so that at least I'd be getting the volume. But on the attempted second set I couldn't even break the weight off the ground.
So my plan now is to deload and try to work back up again. This is extremely frustrating because of how pathetic my deadlift is compared to where it should be, mostly due to perception and starting it out way too light. Here are a few questions I have though to try and make the best of the situation:
1) My hardest part of my Deadlift is breaking the floor. Would it be worth it at all to switch to Halting Deadlifts until the floor break feels easier?
2) If I didn't do #1 and continued to do conventional Deadlifts, should I continue to go for 10 lb increments or immediately switch to 5 lb increments?
2b) If I do move to 5 lb increments, obviously my squats will eclipse my Deadlift weights very soon. Should I add in the Light Squat day? I don't need to yet for the sake of my Squat, but maybe too much heavy squatting will fatigue me for the deadlift?
3) Obviously with me running out of gas on my deadlift there are some conditioning issues. When deloading should I do some higher volume (1x8, 3x5, etc) to help with conditioning?