There’s no question that heavy deadlifts can be dangerous…
I remember seeing a guy try to pull a heavy weight off the floor, and his arms tore off at his shoulders and blood started shooting out of the sockets…
Oh wait, that was a “Saturday Night Live” skit on the Steroid Olympics. Never mind…
Seriously, deadlifts have been revered almost as much as barbell squats for being a mega-mass move, but they really don’t work any muscles through a full range of motion…
The one muscle group that does get a fairly good going over is glutes. The quads help, but with only a partial range.
The lower back is more of a stabilizing muscle if you keep it flat throughout. If you bow forward and straighten up as you pull, there’s decent range of motion and a good strength curve for that muscle—but the danger skyrockets and your local orthopedic surgeon starts pricing yachts…
But what about the upper back? Most powerlifters have good thickness in the traps, often freakish from the neck all the way down the middle back.
Why? The traps aren’t participating with a lot of movement—maybe a partial shrug at best. But there’s a get-bigger trigger at work here that many people miss…
Serious stretch overload.
From the floor to about midway up, the middle traps are getting a wicked stretch. And the upper traps are getting downward pull through the entire range—not quite enough force to rip your arms off, but still lots of overload…
I go into detail on key stretch-overload exercises in Old Man, New Muscle, discussing how to integrate them with the ideal exercises. And some stretch moves qualify as an ideal exercise, like sissy squats for the quads…
One of the landmark studies Jonathan and I bring up a lot here, which I talk about in the new ebook, is one done by Jose Antonio, Ph.D., et al…
According to Antonio, the study “produced the greatest gain in muscle mass ever recorded in an animal or human model of tension-induced overload, up to 334 percent increase in muscle mass.”
It was a bird study that used only stretch overload on the wing—very little movement at all. And more recent studies have shown that stretch overload can “produce significant hypertrophy in humans,” according to researcher Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D.
I would add that stretch overload is one of the big reasons so many of the big bodybuilders, Arnold included, got some excellent layers of mass from biomechanically incorrect piss-poor exercises like T-bar rows.
Similar to deadlifts, it’s got incredible direct mid-back stretch for serious overload…
Both T-bar rows and deadlifts can be dangerous—shoulder shocking and spine crushing if you go for mega-weight.
My choice, when I’m after mid-back stretch overload, is the chest-supported dumbbell row with a twist. Start with your palms facing each other for a stretch, then twist to an under “curl” grip at the top.
The twist at the top allows you to drive your elbows inward toward your spine, the origin for both the traps and lats. So it’s really both a stretch- and contracted-position move—but not in the ideal category due to a crummy resistance curve, among a few other flaws.
Even so, it’s an excellent add-on after the ideal exercise.
I discuss precise form and how to integrate it in the new ebook, with photos. In fact, there are start/finish photos of all the exercises, and some get-off-my-lawn old guy is the model. He’s on the cover too—see it below…
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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