Footwear

Wear flat, non-padded shoes when deadlifting for fuck sake. If your shoe has squishy cushioning, its difficult to tell where you’re placing your load in your foot. You’re also leaking power through that cushion and if the shoe has a heel, you’ve changed all your joint angles. You want to be firmly planted onto the ground. I prefer wrestling shoes or a grippy form fitting minimal athletic shoe. Even casual shoes will work if they’re minimal and flat. Barefoot is also great, but some gyms wont allow it.

Lumbar Bracing Enhanced

Flexing your abs before someone punches you in the gut is bracing. Bracing for a big deadlift is a technical skill which requires a lot of coordination and strength. Bracing creates intra-abdominal pressure to stabilize your spine, so you don’t round over like a turtle and start breaking shit. The more intra-abdominal pressure you can create, the more weight you can lift you can lift safely and the stronger and bigger you can get.

Pausing 2 inches off the floor, in the most difficult spot, requires turbo bracing. The muscles of the thoracic and lumbar spine fire like crazy and the pressure builds quickly. Holding this position, in “The Pain Cave”, builds our bracing ability better than anything I’ve experienced.

Screaming “Activate your core, get tight!” means nothing to a newb who has no idea what it feels like to brace under load. But pausing requires so much bracing that sometimes its all we can feel. Pausing “teaches” us what it feels like to activate our abs, thoracic and lumbar regions.

Strength Builder – Time Under Tension

Time Under Tension (TUT) is the duration a muscle remains under strain. TUT drives strength and size. Entire strength programs are designed around increasing TUT.

Pausing at the hardest part of a deadlift is…well…fucking hard. The harder a lift is, the more muscular activation it requires. The more muscle activation we achieve, the stronger and bigger we become. It’s not rocket science.

Performing normal reps, we pull right past that most difficult spot, 2 inches off the floor, in a fraction of a second. Let’s call that spot “The Pain Cave”. In a full deadlift session, we might only spend a couple seconds doing actual work in The Pain Cave. Our time under tension there is low.

By adding pauses, we amplify our work spent in that fucked up spot. It’s brutal, but it works.

How to Program Paused Deadlifts into your Routine

On Deadlift Day: Once Per Week

I do a few slightly heavy pauses during warm up, before going for my heavy working sets. These prime my body for good positioning and bracing, before laying down the hammer. These reps are more for activating my lumbar and thoracic muscles and locking in a correct movement pattern. These aren’t for building strength.

After my heavy working sets I might do a few sets of triples (3 sets of 3 reps) at a “slightly heavy” weight. These reps are for building strength in good positioning, right off the floor and for improving my bracing strength.

Example Deadlift Session:

Warm up – 135x8; 185x5; 225x3(1 paused); 265x3; 305x2(1 paused); 345x1; 385x1 (paused); 425x1; 465x1

Working Sets – 495x5 (3 sets)

Paused Deadlifts – 405x3 (3 sets)

Speed/hypertrophy Sets – 295x10 (2 sets)

I don’t always included pauses with my deadlift training, but every several months I’ll work them in for several weeks at a time.

I hope this article encourages you to add paused deadlifts to your training. I guarantee your strength will increase and your form will tighten up.

Do you do paused deadlifts? If so, how do you program them?

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

Gabe

For coaching inquiries: gabe@ancientgains.com