If I may toot my own horn here, I constantly receive comments about my back. Specifically, the size of it. And if I may say, I think it’s a pretty impressive back.
My good side: with a face for radio
What else do I constantly receive comments about? How bad my form is on EVERYTHING.
This video currently has WAY more thumbs down than up on youtube
My youtube
channel is FULL of “helpful citizens” telling me that I need to improve my form
on pressing, deadlifting, squatting, strongman lifts, snatches, cleans, etc
etc. Man…what an interesting
relationship we’re observing here. To
quote Roger Alan Wade: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough”, which
would actually be a pretty good title to this post, but I’m already in too
deep. Bad form is absolutely being
“dumb” and, in that regard, the only possible way to survive it is to be tough,
which the body does by getting big and strong.
And that’s going to drive SO many internet lifters crazy, but I am here
to say that bad form is what makes you big and strong.
Talking
about me again (oh boy, my favorite subject), I again refer to the point that I
have “bad form” on lifts. What does bad
form necessarily mean? Two things: form
that is unsafe (which, in and of itself is a debatable idea) AND/OR form that
is INEFFICIENT. We’re focusing on that
second part. Efficiency is awesome when
the goal is PERFORMANCE, because an efficient athlete wastes no energy and
recruits as many muscles as possible into a movement to generate maximal force
(power, exertion, whatever science term you wanna use). When a powerlifter squats, they use the most
efficient squat technique possible, minimizing bar path travel by keeping it as
straight/short as possible and calling in every single muscle they can. Hell, when they bench, they use leg drive:
but isn’t bench a chest exercise? And
there’s where we start talking about training vs competition: when we compete,
we want to be efficient, but when we train?
Efficiency is the enemy.
Dude missed his calling as a strength coach
Dan John has
written about this as it relates to cardiovascular training, and we can
continue to expand it. When we get good
at something, we get efficient at it, and, in turn, it becomes less
challenging. Remember Mariusz
Pudzianowski gassing out in his early MMA career? He was inefficient at fighting such that,
even though he was in fantastic shape, he exhausted his conditioning reserves
with wasted energy and inefficient movements.
Contrast him with Butterbean, who despite resembling a melting candle,
could fight for far more rounds without showing signs of fatigue. But who was getting a better workout? When our goal is improvement, we NEED struggle,
we NEED to gas out, we NEED exertion and exhaustion and fatigue. Being good at something is the opposite of
what we want if our goal is to generate a stimulus that results in growth,
because we fall back on our refined skillset and use the least energy possible
to accomplish the goal. Talking about
powerlifters again, note the technique employed in a meet compared to what you
may view in a bodybuilding training session.
A bodybuilder will squat with a closer set stance, sometimes with the
heels obscenely elevated and an elongated ROM, because they’re trying to be
INefficient with their movement: because they want this movement to result in
growth!
And so here
we are: bad form results in big muscles.
And circling back to myself, when it comes to building a big and strong
back, you could do no better than using some bad form. If you clean a weight from the floor with a
REAL, honest to goodness clean, you got some awesome hip pop into it with that
triple extension and make fantastic use of all the explosiveness contained in
your whole body. When you yank it off
the floor and hope for the best, that’s a LOT of back work. No leg drive in your deadlifts? Better have a strong back. You good morning your squats? Hope your back is up to the task. To say nothing of if you use a safety squat
bar and pull the handles down so that you round like hell. The back (and glutes) is the workhorse of
your body, and will gladly take on the load in situations wherein the other
muscles fail to step up, primarily because the operator “forgot” to use
them. My back is big and strong because
I rely on it so much to get things done, and this is where strongman, as a
sport, REALLY shines. In powerlifting or
weightlifting, if I were to employ the technique I use, I’d most likely get
“red lights” due to some sort of rule violation. Strongman is very much “get the weight from A
to B however you can”, which means I can rely on my back to carry me through.
There is a precedent here...
This
principle doesn’t just relate to the back though: if you want some yoked
shoulders and traps, stop being so goddamn good at getting weight overhead and
start getting bad at it. In particular: quit trying to jerk the weight, quit
trying to push press it, and quit trying to be so quick on the press: press the
weight strictly, with no leg drive, over your head. Geoff Capes and Bill Kazmaier were “rivals”
in the early 80s of strongman, both dudes could be some decent weight overhead,
Capes relied on the jerk and speed, Kaz relied on brute strength. Of the two, guess which one looked
jacked? Check out the physiques of
weightlifters in the era where the press was a contested lift vs after the
fact, particularly the development of deltoids, traps and upper pecs. Check out the physiques of professional
strongman competitors vs those aforementioned weightlifters. Etc.
“Bad form” is building bigger and stronger muscles here, because when we
can’t rely on technique, we HAVE to rely on muscle.
Man this is
getting long and I haven’t even really expressed what I wanted to say, but
let’s talk muscle confusion while I’m already alienating people. It works.
Does it work for the reasons people say it works? Who cares: the point is, changing up your
stimulus prevents you from getting GOOD at lifting, which, if your goal is to build
muscle, is a GOOD thing, for everything I outlined above. Once we start getting good, we start getting
stagnant, but when we are ALWAYS struggling, we’re always growing. John Meadows was famous for saying he never
did the same workout twice, which frustrates a lot of “beat the logbook” dudes,
but if your goal is to get bigger and stronger, the variable we aim for is
exertion. Yes, when it comes to lifting
maximal poundages we want repeatable performances that can be measured against
and evaluated, but when it comes to BUILDING that strength, we need lots and
lots of struggling and floundering.
But not like that...
And before I
sign off, remember: me writing about something working does NOT mean that the
opposite DOESN’T work. Can you get big
and strong WITHOUT variation and bad form?
Sure. Mike Tuchscherer is famous
for sticking with just the competition lifts and VERY close variations of it
and just manipulating the training volume.
In turn, the first time I saw Mike in person, he was the biggest human
I’d ever seen in my life and had a physical presence that just consumed the
room. There are jacked weightlifters and
powerlifters that only do the competition lifts. It certainly works. BUT, the opposite is ALSO true: if you want
to get big and strong from weird angles in stupid ways, bad form will get you
there.
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