Rack Pulls for Novices?

Any experienced strength coach can tell you that the fastest way to build a new trainee’s deadlift is to simply deadlift – alot.  If you are deadlifting with regularity then you don’t really need any special assistance work to make progress.  The deadlift itself covers all your bases.  At Kingwood Strength & Conditioning I have all my new clients deadlift every single workout for the first several weeks they are training with me.  Whether they train with me 2 or 3 days per week, we deadlift at every session until it becomes apparent that we can no longer do so.   The length of time each clients lasts with this amount of frequency is highly variable and dependent on factors such as age, gender, mechanics, frequency, etc.

For us, the Rack Pull is generally reserved for intermediate level trainees.  That is – trainees who can no longer progress their deadlifts on a weekly basis.  Rack Pulls are used every 2-4 weeks in a rotation of other deadlift variants that substitute for regular deadlifts.  For those of you who don’t know what a Rack Pull is – go read Part I in the Power Rack Series.

Up until the last month or two it never really occurred to me to use a Rack Pull for Novice level training.  The main reason being – I have never had to.  Deadlifts use more muscle mass over a longer range of motion, and are an overall better exercise than a Rack Pull.  But in the past several months I have accepted 2 new clients into my program, both of which presented me with enormous problems when trying to coach the deadlift to them.  Now, I’m not saying that my current clients don’t regularly challenge my coaching abilities – they do.  I deal with a wide array of body types, ages, and abilities on a daily basis and many of them have to work exceedingly hard to master some of the basic barbell movements.  But by and large, I am generally able to get clients into an acceptable deadlift position within a workout or two.  Not always perfect, but good enough to train with and safely add weight to the bar.

One of my most recent clients is a guy in his mid-30s, named Jesse.  A little younger than my typical demographic of 45-75, but usually a demographic that learns movement pretty well, as some of the negative consequences of age have yet to set in.  Jesse has been the exception.  I have literally tried everything I know.  At this point in my career I have trained hundreds of personal training clients and conducted hundreds of strength coaching sessions for people looking to learn the barbell lifts.  I can generally fix anything and get anyone to deadlift.  And it must be stated that I am not a perfectionist with my clients.  I don’t need them to be perfect.  I need them to be good enough to train and load, and we refine things as we go.  But alas I found myself unable to teach Jesse how to deadlift.  There was no verbal or tactile cue that worked, no amount of demonstration or explanation that had an impact.  When it came time to pull anything of any substance, it turned into a train wreck.  Both of us were getting frustrated, and wasting valuable training time trying to learn something that seemingly couldn’t be learned.

So I took him over to the Rack.

I set the pins up a little below the knees and put 135 on the bar and did a quick demo and explanation of what a Rack Pull should look like.  He did a set of 5.  Pretty good.  I put on 185, then 225.  Both for sets of 5.  Both pretty good.  He wasn’t making any of the same mistakes he was making with the deadlift.  He was holding his arch and not shooting his hips up before pulling.  So I went up to 275.  He ground out what was for him a fairly heavy set, but held his mechanics together nicely.  So now, here we are just a few weeks later and he’s banging out sets of 5 with 385.  A huge Rack Pull?  No.   But it’s certainly better than just fucking around with practice deadlift reps at 135-225.  This bothered me at first.  Abandoning a core exercise and violating one of my programming principles.  But I had to ask myself  “What is his training goal?  What is the endstate we really want?  Do we need to perfect the Deadlift or do we need to build a bigger stronger back?”  The answer is of course the latter.  And the Rack Pull is accomplishing the mission.  His back and traps are noticeably bigger, his squat even started moving faster, and neither lifter or coach are wasting time and getting frustrated.

So why did the Rack Pull work so well when the Deadlift was such a mess?  I don’t know.  Alll I know is that when the bar gets down on the ground his brain goes haywire.  He completely loses feel for what everything is supposed to do, and as his coach it would have been irresponsible of me to try and load him up with weight.  Would it be better now?  It might, and we are gonna try it again in a few weeks.  He wants to get to 405 first on his Rack Pulls.  You see, he is motivated instead of frustrated.  He is aware that he is on a “remedial” program, but he’s okay with that because he see’s himself getting bigger and stronger. And that’s what he cares about more than anything.  Not just doing a certain lift because that’s what the program says to do.  My hope is that the increased strength and muscle mass in his back will help with his kinesthetic awareness, and we will have better success at our next attempt to learn the regular deadlift.  But I’m in no particular hurry.

The moral of the story is this:  Get outside the box a bit if something isn’t working.  There is a difference between being patient and persistent and stifling progress because you lose sight of the bigger picture.

Conducting this experiment with Jesse led me to use the same approach for another new client who just began with me a few weeks ago.  We will examine James’ situation in an article that I am preparing for next week – Barbell Training and the Obese.