Hey Rip,
I just want to send you a huge thank you email for fixing my deadlift. I’ve been seriously lifting for total 6 years, but only since around last fall have I gotten back into serious barbell training after 2 years completely off and another 2 years of fuckarounditis. As a 23 year old at 6’ 218, I can currently squat 455 (comp depth) and bench 340 (paused), even though my “projected maxes” for each are about 10-15 pounds higher.

Unfortunately I could only barely hit 405 on the deadlift up to this point, which I blamed on my t-rex arms and a relatively long torso. I tried both sumo and semi sumo and both were on par with my (previous) best deadlift. I spent a good 6 months stalling, until I read your Tnation article from a few years back last night. By following your 1 run-on sentence instructions, it only took me a single workout to hit 455, a 50 pound PR.

The biggest fix was my feet were out too wide, which made it even harder to reach down to grab the bar, and my knees weren’t coming forward far enough, which meant my hip moment arm was longer then it needed to be. Hopefully by implementing these fixes permanently, I will be able to actually train the deadlift instead of spending all my time trying to tweak the deadlift and it’ll take me far less time to progress to 500 then it did to 455.