Deadlifts

My love affair with the weight room has compelled me to try interesting things. Quick update on my primary focus now... after several years of what I call "heavy addiction", that is, lifting heavier weight with lower reps and daily eating my body weight in chicken, I am endeavoring to lean out a bit. I have no doubt I can do it, but it involves checking myself into Heavy-holics Anonymous, heretofore known as H.A.

Clever, eh?

It was getting kind of silly. My weightlifting routines were getting up to two hours a pop, and that was before I did any cardio. After two hours, I'm usually skipping the cardio. Heck, I'm skipping the postworkout shower. I would rest about four minutes in between reps and do 12-18 sets per muscle group, and train two muscle groups per session.

Now, I go to HA, and pair chest with biceps, back with triceps, shoulders and traps with core, and legs with lower back... four sessions a week. I'm usually doing a "superset" format where I'll have a chest and biceps exercise, for example, paired up and I go back and forth with hardly any rest. While my chest is resting, I'm lifting the other muscle group. I'm sweating like crazy after the first couple exercises. I'm still lifting heavy by most standards, but less than usual. And grabbing for a lighter weight, even when I'm gassed, is a blow to my musclehead ego. Once I finish the pair, I'll do some abs or core work, or drink a pool-load of water, and then move onto the next superset pair. I'm finishing my lifts in about an hour and fifteen minutes, then onto the dreaded CARDIO!! Oh, the treadmill, the bane of my existence at HA...

Okay, that's me now. But my latest masochistic obsession is called the deadlift. Just think about the two words that make up this exercise's name...

Dead.

Lift.

Sounds like a party, right? No. Most people rightly would rather try to sneak a chocolate pie past a hungry grizzly and an even hungrier Rush Limbaugh.

Basically, you load a bunch of plates onto a barbell on the floor, straighten your legs and back, grab the bar, and try to stand up straight. It hurts like you wouldn't believe once you get the right resistance. My lower back and my hamstrings are wasted for days.

This actually causes a predicament for me. I have to put deadlifts at the end of my leg/lower back workout because if I put them earlier, I can barely move to do anything else. But I'm exhausted by the end of my leg workout already, so I don't have much left in the tank for "deads".

I was lifting the other day, and someone walked by me and said I must be superhuman. As flattering as that sounds, I know the truth: that new students to the school of deadlifting are stupid-human.

Here's why. If the goal of such concentrated weightlifting is to make a particular muscle look good, then why in the world would I do these deadlifts? Nobody wants to look and any guy's lower back, and if anyone is actually staring at my hamstrings, they are getting perilously close to what I call the "forbidden city".

And yet, I can't get over how effective the exercise itself is. It took me years of training my lower back separately before I tried deads, because I've had lower back problems in the past. But whoa!

If doing yoga is like a graceful, fluttering dragonfly to those muscles, then deadlifts are like the monster from freakin' Cloverfield.

I don't know where in the world those analogies come from. Maybe they come from HA.