duane hansen deadlift routine
Deadlift every damn day of the week; squat every other day. Once a week try for a heavy deadlift. Eat, sleep, then repeat
My general answer is always the same, because it works. The application of the details is the fulcrum where things either work or they do not.
If a lifter wants to be able to deadlift a big weight in the near future, they will need to practice deadlifting. The best way to practice something is to do it often. Squatting three days/week is a proven way to get stronger.
Some of the nuances in this particular case might be:
1) The daily deadlifts should be done with 80% weights. This is not the place to kill yourself.
2) The squats might be best performed as box squats (in the classical Westside style: wide-stance, ass back, no higher than a bit below parallel).
3) If an athlete has trouble locking out a barbell that they have pulled up around their knees, it would not be a bad thing to do some partial deadlifts a couple days/week from just below the knees. The bar path here does not resemble the bar path of a real deadlift, but doing sets of three reps off of boxes with your knees pushed back, your ass up in the air and all the weight you can manage will fill in any gaps a lifter may have.
Missing a deadlift after the bar gets to the knees is sad, but it is much more fixable than the deadlift that hovers around your ankles.
80% is just a starting point. One thing that you could do is load a barbell to about 80% and leave it sitting there on the platform. Every day you could wander up to it, do your 10 singles and then wander off when you are done. The clever bit would be to add 1-2kg to the barbell before you wander off. That way you will be lifting more weight tomorrow than you did today. I started a program like this with 165kg on the barbell (my best DL at the time was in the 200kg-range) and eventually I got to the point where I was doing 10 singles every day with 195kg. My 1RM at that point (when I could be bothered to test it) was much more than 200kg.
The interesting thing I found about doing daily deadlifts starting with about 80% of my max is that I could very nearly always just walk up to the loaded barbell and start lifting. I would change into workout clothes and switch my mind into workout/lifting mode, of course, but I found that I didn't actually need to warm-up before performing the series of heavy singles (even after the barbell started approaching 90-95% of what I had been calling my 1RM).
Deadlifts are an interesting lift because you start the lift with all of the weight on the floor. Either you can lift the barbell or you cannot; with a lift like the squat, you have to support 100% of the weight before you can even begin to attempt it. I got good results from this approach: lift progressively heavier weights quite often, don't warm-up too much for the effort, and work on the weak links in the chain occasionally.
duane hansen deload week
One plan for a deload week that has always worked well for me is to never lift a weight more than 80% of my max and stick to singles. This lets me still get into the gym every day (just so I can stick with the plan of showing up) but the work that I do there is just at a bare minimum level. If you have been busting ass before a deload week, this kind of work (80% singles) will let your body recover; showing up everyday despite it being a deload week keeps you in the habit of showing up. Also, I try to eat the same during a deload week as I would during any other week. The deload week is programmed to let the body recover and over-compensate for the stress of the previous heavy weeks; eating like you are on a diet will not help here.
My opinion on the subject is this:
A good, long-term plan is to train balls-out for two weeks and then back way off during the third week. The two weeks of balls-out training should have you feeling like you have been run over by a truck or two. As a result, the first week of the back-off week will have the 80% weights feeling like 100%. But, by the end of the back-off week you should feel like you could set a record or two. The thing is this, however, most people cannot push themselves hard enough during the hard weeks and even if they do, they do not back off enough during the easy weeks. The contrast between the hard and the easy weeks is what really pushed the body the most to adapt to the stress. If you don't work hard enough during the hard weeks and too hard during the easy week, there will never be enough stress to force you body to adapt at all.
duane hansen ghr
I am just putting this out here for general consideration:
I used to do back extensions when I was younger; this is similar to a glute/ham raise on a GHR apparatus, more or less.
What I used was a sawhorse with some carpet on the top and my heels anchored under a 2x4 nailed to the studs in my garage (also padded with carpet). The sawhorse was low enough for me to put a barbell on my back and, as I added more carpet over time, it approached a round-enough shape so I could get my hamstring muscles into the movement at the top. In the beginning, however, it was just a low back + glute movement.
Several years later I had the opportunity to use one of the first actual glute/ham benches (this was in the early-90's). The actual apparatus that was designed for this type of movement was better than my old sawhorse & carpet rig, but I seriously doubt that it was $1000 better.
A couple of years ago I bought a used GHR apparatus for $100. I use it mainly for ab work (i.e., Roman Chair Situps). I have gone back to doing back extensions on a sawhorse and really heavy good mornings when I need to get stronger on the backside of my body.
This is just my experience; your mileage may vary
duane hansen good mornings
I set up for the good mornings with the same stance and bar position that I would use for the back squat. Instead of squatting down I push my hips back and bend forwards. I keep my low back arched during the whole movement and my knees will bend passively. I am trying to bend as far forward as I can without falling forwards, so to keep the bar above my feet my hips need to move back and my knees have to bend a bit. The bottom of the movement depends on the amount of weight on the barbell; I can get lower with the lighter weights but a heavier barbell will tip me forward sooner. Once I get to the bottom, I stop and stand back up. The idea is to straighten back up just by extending the hips.
The good mornings put the greatest amount of stress on you when you are at your most bent over; the back extensions have the greatest amount of stress at the top of the movement where your hips are fully extended. The combination of these two movements allow you to stress the muscles on the back side of your body at both extremes. Interestingly, the heavy good mornings will often give me all of the ab work that I seem to need, too.
Hope I didn't pontificate too much here
duane hansen lower back
When you hurt your back for the first time when you are lifting, you should probably go and see an MD just to rule out anything catastrophic. After your MD tells you that you just strained (or pulled; whatever) a muscle in your low back, you should get off your ass and fix the problem.
The best way to fix it (in my opinion) is to use ice, heat (wait at least a day after the injury to use heat), stretching, drugs (e.g., Tylenol) and lifting. My experience has shown that I can lift a lot of weight through a limited ROM very soon after injuring my low back muscles. I can usually work back up to at least 90% of my pre-injury weights in under a week, as long as I am paying attention to the things I was neglecting before the injury (usually stretching in the muscles around the low back).
If you injure a muscle in your low back once, you will probably do it again some time. But, the next time around you will not be as surprised and you should be able to fix it quicker
duane hansen on bent rows
The style of rowing in that video is not a bad way to do it. The trick, however, is to put enough weight on the barbell so you need to heave it up like that. I have seen some people (no one around here that I can think of, of course) perform a set of barbell rows that looked just like that, except that the had the barbell loaded to somewhere between 95-135 pound. My take on the barbell row is that each rep should start on the floor and finish tucked into you waist (right about at the top of your pants).
The amount of weight that you use should be heavy and you should do sets and reps with it (3-5 x 3-5). As you get stronger, you should be able to pull the barbell back into your waist with less movement required from the upper body; if your reps start looking too pretty, it is probably time to add some more weight.
Another thing that I find to be very productive when doing barbell rows is to start the movement (with the barbell on the floor, of course) with my low back less-than-strongly arched. I am not saying that you should be pulling a huge weight off of the floor while you are bent over at the waist and you low back is rounded, but if you can start with a neutral back and move it into a strongly arched position by the end of the movement, this will make things more productive. Simply, the top of the muscles in your low back and the bottom of your lats have a common origin. If you can contract the muscles in your low back very hard at the start of the movement, this will contribute to the ability of the lats to contract (and it is the lats that are doing a lot of the work pulling the barbell in at the top of the movement).