Fail early, fail often

My personal philosophy when training, and in many other areas in my life has been to fail early, and fail often. Simply put it, it means not being scared of failure, but giving it your best shot all the same. It's been a good approach so far, and there's very few exercises where it's more fun to fail than on deadlifts.

Unlike squats or a bench press, where a failure can often be catastrophic, you're unlikely to hurt yourself on deadlifts if your form is correct. Actually, no, I lie. That's true for all three lifts. Failing on a bench press attempt when you're properly spotted with proper form is in no way dangerous. However, take this idiot for example, attempting a 1RM max on bench but with a 'suicide grip' (the thumb isn't wrapped around the bar, so it rolls off his hand). I know it sucks, but he pretty much got what was coming to him:

Or take this guy for example, doing his 2 inch squats, again, if he'd be doing proper deep squats with about 1/3 of the weight, he'd probably have had a much better day over all:

So actually, scratch that. I'm all about failing, but failing safely when you've got 150kg over your head is probably important. Anyway, back to deadlifts, which I really enjoy. I had my training partner, housemate and homie Steyn take a video of me doing some deadlifts this week at the gym, and compared them to a video of myself from six months ago, and I was really happy with the progress, not only in terms of the strength gain, but considering I've worked hard to get my weight down as well.

Here's the first video, taken around the end of last year. At the time, I was about 115kg, and this was a 1RM attempt on 170kg.

So a couple of things, form is pretty horrible. At this point, I was still very much a novice, and I'm lifting 170kg and struggling my ass off on a single lift. Interesting, it was around this point people first started really noticing the weight loss, but I'm still tubby as all fuck. At this point, weighing 115kg and lifting 170kg, it's only a 1.5x bodyweight lift. That's not particularly impressive - it's barely makes the grade for basic functional strength. For what it's worth, I'd define basic functional strength as the following: 1.5x BW deadlift, 1x BW squat, 0.75x BW bench press, 0.35x BW overhead press. Anyway, so yeah, not amazing.

Fast forward to this week, and I rocked a 170kg double with significantly better form, and off a 95kg frame.

Form is still nowhere near perfect, and thanks to a thread I left on the Fitocracy Fittit group, I got some excellent feedback. My back is still rounding an unacceptable amount, and I need to work on that, but generally speaking, it's looking less like the deadlift performed by someone with a debilitating muscle condition and severe lack of co-ordination.

I like progress. It makes me joyful.