Max Deadlift

So today is my "rest week," which really means "break from my programming week." My plan isn't really to take it easy, but rather to just do something besides what I normally program for these days. I figure it will help refresh me mentally while still letting work hard and make gains physically. Cool stuff.

Anyways, I decided to do a max deadlift today. Originally, I was planning on doing a max deficit dead, but I decided to just pull conventional for 2 reasons: 1: I wanted to try pulling with my hips a little lower than at my mock meet, and see if that helped with my weight/back rounding, and 2: Last time I pulled it was after max squat and max bench, so I wanted to test my heavy dead while I was fresh.

Yeahhhh

SO, warmed up, jumping 40 lbs a set. weights are a little weird because of the bumpers my gym has, but here's how it looked:

85 x 3
125 x 3
165 x 3
205 x 2 singles
245 x 1
285 x 1
325 x 1
365 x 1
375 x 1

It felt really good to pull with my hips slightly lower. My back did go a little bit on the heavy reps, but no worse than it did at 355, and this was 20 lbs heavier. Overall, I'm crazy psyched about a 20 lb pr today. When i came to school in september (so only about 8 months ago, give or take), my max dead was 275. So over the course of this year, I've put 100 lbs on this lift. Pretty awesome. Here's videos.

365, back doesn't round much and it's pretty fast

375, back gets pretty round but nothing too bad, and it still moved pretty nicely

So, obviously my deadlift training is on track. Things to work on: as soon as I get the bar over my knees, I push my knees forward and slide the bar up my thighs... It's not a hitch, but it still would be better to NOT do that. So I'm going to work on that with my speed work for the next few cycles.

Afterwards, I was pretty shaky and tired, but I had in my head that I wanted to squat for 3 sets of 5 - 10 reps. I worked up to 225, and did that for a set of 10 that was hard but not miserable. After that set, my friend Josh told me to make sure not to cut my squats off at exactly parallel, but instead to sink into it a little further and make use of my stretch reflex. Doing this felt GREAT, and I think it could really help me on max attempts to MAKE SURE I'm doing that exact same thing. Anyways, ended up getting another  2 pretty easy sets of 10 at 225. Very happy with this, that's some quality assistance work on any day, never mind after a max deadlift.

Anyways, pretty awesome day, had a lot of fun and kicked ass. Looking forward to the rest of the week.... although I'm feeling that dead, definitely looking forward to upper body more than lower body for the rest of the week!