Aaaaaand welcome to a new pretty week. And what better way to start the week with picking up some heavy stuff. Todays workout: 7 x 4 reps – Sumo Deadlifts.
This was a nice recap from a workout we did a couple of weeks ago, 7 x 5 reps Sumo Deadlifts. Those who were there had a pretty good idea of how heavy they are able to pick up a sumo deadlift, which makes the decision about which starting weight to begin the 7×4 with a lot easier. Warm-up, stretches, lots of technique and go time! For a lot of you guys, the sumo deadlift is an easier lift than the conventional deadlift. Lifting heavier weights is for someone who´s a bit trained in (sumo) deadlifts most of the time easier than in a normal deadlift, where your feet are smaller and your hands outside of your legs. This has a couple of reasons: 1. A tight hip or bad flexibility around the hamstrings plays a smaller role. Because we´re bending over less, our chest stays higher, we don´t need to use the hip in it´s full range of motion. Staying within your comfortable range of motion of the hip means you are stronger in most positions during the lift (you might be weaker towards the end of your range of motion because it´s a less trained position)!
2. This less using of the hip has another advantage: The legs (read, quadriceps) are more dominant in the sumo deadlift, where in the normal deadlift the hips plays a bigger role. For people with a less than perfect hip function, less hips means less room for mistakes = easier to pick up a heavy bar without making technical errors!
3. The total distance that the bar travels is less. Because your ending position of the sumo deadlift is less high (your standing wide and therefor your hip comes lower) than in a normal deadlift, you don´t have to pull the bar up that far. Pulling a heavy bar up 75 cm is a lot easier than pulling it up 1 meter;)
There´s a ton of more reasons that I´m not going to bore you with. What I would like to bore you with is witch how much I enjoyed seeing you guys do this today. Coaching a deadlift is always a ´´challenging´´event, since it´s tricky when members go heavier than they should. For my feeling, or at least in my classes, this wasn´t the case. We´ve got some pretty coachable people over here at Verftet, all having enough thrust in the coaches to know when to push and when to stop, allowing you to move heavy, but safely! Makes me as a coach very happy!
Another thing that happened today: All the boys finally got a haircut after Corona. This weekend, we´re going to lock ourselves in a cabin from friday till monday to rebuild the website! For this website, we needed new pictures of the coaches, so today was the day. Andreas go a nice haircut, I (Mart) even shaved for the occassion, Sam was wearing mascara and Ben was totally looking fabolous. Pictures will follow!
Have a very nice night guys, takk for i dag and let´s have a great week full of fitness together:)
