Dufisthenics

So yesterday was my leg day at the gym.  For the past couple months I have been doing a combo of squats and dead lift, focusing much more on the dead lift part of the workout.   I only do two quick squat sets, one at 135 pounds and another at 185 before I start the DL’s.

I have been making some solid progress in my lifts the last few weeks and yesterday that improvement continued with me pulling 295 lbs x 3 and then 305 lbs x 1 at the end.  I really should video my form, it feels like I keep things more or less aligned but with my stretch legs and arms I am sure it looks somewhat awkward.

There is a problem I have when I get to dead lifting the bigger weight, the barbell is slightly bent.  Not just one of the bars is bent, pretty much all of them in the free weight are to some degree.  This is annoying at lighter weights and dangerous at bigger numbers.

What happens is if you are lifting the heavy weight and the slight bend is facing up instead of down the bar will want to rotate and flip in your hands.  When you are lifting weight that you can hardly hold in the first place, having it spin is not a good thing and potentially quite dangerous if it causes you to drop the weight.  I guess I need to point out to the management that they have a collection of bent olympic bars.

So anyway, pulling 305 was difficult as expected.  I have dead lifted slightly more weight a couple years ago when I pulled 310 at home.  However with that attempt I used a mixed grip (one hand overhand grip one hand underhand grip).  Yesterday I used a double overhand grip which is more difficult.  I am trying to stick with overhand grip to maximize my grip work.  305 pounds felt very close to my grip limit.

The short term goal would be to pull 3 plates per side with an overhand grip (315 pounds).  If I manage to not hurt myself I might be able to get there before the June calendar expires.