Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Pick it up & Put it down

The deadlift, the king of lifts.  It's the one thing that can tell you whether or not you're able to do it.  It doesn't lie to you, it doesn't sugarcoat things for you, it just says whether or not you can do it.

It is easily one of the easiest or hardest lifts to learn and to perform.  You can gain a tremendous amount of strength by using this one lift alone or you can gain a tremendous amount of muscle mass with it.

Every part of your body becomes active when you deadlift.  Rather than isolate by muscles, we create a symphony of activation of your muscles when you deadlift.  This is all related to your Central Nervous System activating the muscles that are required to simply pick the bar up.

Athletically, every sport may benefit from this lift.  You go from literally no tension on your muscles to maximal tension on your muscles coordinated to fire simultaneously.  There are few other exercises that accomplish this task.

The deadlift can be broken down into simple parts.  There's the setup, where you position yourself with the bar.  Next is "pulling the slack out" of the bar, which is really just an extension of the setup.  This stage involves the tightening of your joints and the beginning of tension to your muscles (I didn't use the word "flex" as it implies a direction of movement).  Next is the massive buildup of tension which precedes the lift, from there it's a systematic firing of muscles to lift the bar off of the ground.

Simple right?  Go ahead and take a shot at it and you'll see how "simple" it is.  

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