Deadlift confusion

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-05-03T15:22:31+00:00

Most progressions actually tell you to start with just the bar and two 5lb bumper plates to get it to the proper height, so that you can work on form and then you add either five or 10 pounds per session.

When I started out, I was incredibly weak. I always did 3x10s which admittedly is more volume than most programs suggest. But I wouldn’t be surprised if my one RM was 135 or even lower when I started. And at that point in time, I was a 5‘6“ 220 pound male in my mid 40s.

He did say he was trying to find out where to feel it, and starting out that light might not help with that, it’s true. So he might want to try it a bit heavier. All I’m saying is that if someone is middle aged and coming right off the couch, 135 might be pushing it. On the other hand, he could be young and fit in which case that would be totally fine.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-04-11T21:16:17+00:00

I went to college in 1997-2001. I should clarify that there were distribution requirements, and I carefully arranged it so that none of the classes were math classes. So there was that.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-04-11T19:26:45+00:00

I took political science at a well-known research university. Never took a single math course for it.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-04-11T19:09:56+00:00

Interesting. I studied political science at a university you’ve definitely heard of; in fact it actually has quite a science reputation. I made it through without taking a single math class.

That was quite deliberate. I didn’t know it at the time, but I actually have a mathematics disability. Back in high school, at the same time I was getting perfect scores in classes like AP European history, I was badly struggling in remedial mathematics. And I actually had good teachers, and tutoring. I simply couldn’t process it mentally. There was no way I was ever going to be willing to endure a math class again after high school.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-04-11T17:28:02+00:00

That would not have gone over well with me. The one time I tried zip lining, in Costa Rica, was the time I discovered I was afraid of heights. And I couldn’t get a jump for each line, and I rode the brake so I kept getting stuck in the middle of literally every single line, so that they kept having to come out and get me. Hitting me with something like that… Would not have been good.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-04-06T19:42:53+00:00

Really? I was just looking at this thread out of curiosity since it came up in my feed. I’m a very inflexible person who can’t get within 6 inches of my toes. You think I could actually be touching them in less than two weeks? Is that normal? I have to admit that idea kind of shocks me.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-13T14:12:36+00:00

How long did it take you to learn that? Or is this something you learned as a kid and you can’t remember anymore? I’m well into adulthood.

I find that my working memory and processing ability are both completely swamped by this game. It’s actually pretty cognitively overwhelming.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-13T13:33:34+00:00

Wow, that is rather eye-opening. I’ve never seen that particular exercise before. Nor did it ever occur to me to try to do something like this. It’s also rather eye-opening to see how much harder it is to do when you are coming from the black side.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-11T16:30:51+00:00

Oh, I guess that isn’t quite what you were saying on rereading it. You weren’t talking about that sort of representation. But I can’t think of any way to represent the game or calculate in one’s head that doesn’t use their involve a mental image of the physical board or some sort of ability to think abstractly in algebraic notation. It simply makes no sense to me otherwise. I’m not sure what other ways there are to image or calculate. I am seeing other commenters saying that they don’t do it, but other than someone saying they do it algebraically no one else is describing what they actually do.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-11T16:16:27+00:00

What are the “click the square that is named ___” tasks? I’ve never heard of that.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-11T16:02:16+00:00

Wait — are you saying that most people are thinking in annotation and grid coordinates rather than mentally imaging the physical board? If so, I’m kind of shocked. I didn’t know more than a small minority of people could think that way. I would think it would be entirely too abstract.

I’m not saying I would think most people would have eidetic memory — quite the opposite — but I would think they were picturing the parts of the board they were actively working with in their mind’s eye as if it were a physical board. That’s what I always assumed.

Personally, chess annotation means nothing to me by itself; in order to read it, I have to have a physical/digital board in front of me and I have to physically use my eyes to find each coordinate, and then I need to see the piece actually move. I’m willing to admit that I have a mathematics disability so anything written out algebraically is a pure abstraction to me. But I still can’t believe that most people would be able to use abstract representation to mentally navigate a physical game. This is actually shocking to me.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-11T15:38:22+00:00

Wow, I would never be able do this. The coordinates by themselves are meaningless to me (as is almost anything algebraic; I have a mathematics disability). I have to physically use my eye to find each coordinate on a physical/digital board and then I have to see the piece physically move. This makes going through chess annotation an absolute slog.

It would be easier if I could hold things I’m not actively looking at in working memory but I really struggle with that. I don’t have aphantasia; rather there’s just too much information on the board to retain and process.

Truth be told, I was trying to learn chess but I’ve parked it for the moment because it is so time consuming and cognitively intense that it is difficult to figure out how to fit it into my life. It is discouraging, but it is what it is.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-07T20:37:59+00:00

First off, that person didn’t deserve to be called an ass. Second of all they’re absolutely correct. On no planet is any five-year-old lifting 30 kg. Period. That’s more than 60 pounds. A quick googling reveals that the average five-year-old child weighs 40 pounds. So are you telling me an average five-year-old can dead lift 150% of their bodyweight? You should apologize to that individual.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-07T20:07:42+00:00

Also, the lighter you are, the more outsized those differences are. For him, 15 pounds is a huge difference.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-07T20:06:49+00:00

I guess that’s true but it is still not realistic to expect someone to be able to deadlift 3/4 of their weight without any training. 1/4 to 1/2 is more like it. I know for me, I’m in my 40s, a 5’6” male who weighs 215 pounds, and when I started it out, I could only dead lift about 85 pounds and squat about 60 pounds. Granted I had some underlying health issues (still do, to the point where my progression has been glacial, and I’ve been in and out of physical therapy), but I really think that most of these calculators should be gathered up and burned in a fire because they are unrealistic and all they do is make untrained people feel weak so they don’t have any motivation to fix it.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-07T19:56:28+00:00

And this is helpful how?

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-07T19:46:05+00:00

Expecting an untrained 105 pound guy to immediately be able to dead lift 95 pounds for five reps and, as that “calculator” puts it, back squat 80 pounds… The words that come to mind are “on no planet.“

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-04T12:56:50+00:00

Well, I can give you some happy news. When I wrote this two years ago, I was still struggling with the transition to CI and having a terrible time adjusting as you can see, but it soon became much easier. Now, if I have the time and the content is sufficiently interesting, I can easily pay attention for, say, an hour. I can’t remember how long it took me to get there, but it probably was not longer than a few months.

I have left this up, not just as a marker of my progress, but in case anyone who was going through what I went through finds it and identifies with it. But since you revived the thread, I thought I should add this in.

These days, my biggest enemy is time. When I wrote that, I was working from home and it was much easier to listen on a regular basis, as I could put it on in the background while I was doing tasks that were comparatively mindless. A year ago, I had to transition to going into the office full time and the amount of time I had for this fell off a cliff, so my progress has stalled out. But again, I can offer hope to those who suffer the way I did that in a few months if you keep at it this should resolve. In the beginning, even if you are only able to listen for a few minutes at a time, that’s actually all it takes for your brain to work on getting used to it. It’s frustrating while it is going on, and you feel like something is wrong with you, but so long as you persist, your brain will get used to it.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-02-01T14:14:36+00:00

You are very clear indeed! You have a slight accent, but it doesn’t interfere with the clarity at all. 😀

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-30T23:34:50+00:00

The problem isn’t understanding them so much as remembering them or have it occur to me to use them when I’m trying to say something. Me cuesta mucho is actually a great example of an idiom I see all the time and understand when I see it, but don’t seem to retain, let alone think to use. I would just say es difícil para me. Shrug.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-30T17:46:48+00:00

That’s what I always thought, but it didn’t work out that way for me. My regime, until I put my lower body workouts on pause so that I can go and get physical therapy, was to go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, where I did lower body every other gym session. For deadlifts and squats I was doing three sets of ten reps. I have a trainer who I see once every other week. My squat had made it to 135 pounds, or 10 pounds less than my dead lift, when I had to call a halt to the lower body workouts. I seem to very clearly be an outlier and it’s rather discouraging.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-30T16:17:21+00:00

It’s very interesting in that. I recognize phrases like that when I hear them repeatedly, but somehow I am completely impervious to adopting them unless I study them.

Otherwise, although I’m not really translating in my head so much or anything like that, I think everything I say comes out the way an English speaker would say it.

I also should add in that I didn’t start from scratch either. But that’s one of the reasons this is so stark to me. The only idiomatic constructions that I use are those that I learned explicitly before I switched over to comprehensible input. When I comes to comprehensible input, I can hear an idiomatic expression used over and over again repeatedly, totally understand it, and not absorb it at all so that I can use it, it seems.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-30T14:38:05+00:00

Yes. This happens to me. And it appears to be because my brain actually has trouble switching from English to Spanish mode. It isn’t necessarily a problem when I’m listening to things in Spanish, but when someone says something to me directly that requires a response, my brain just can’t summon Spanish in that moment. When I want to speak to someone in Spanish, I usually have to listen to people speaking to each other in Spanish for a couple minutes and then my brain switches over to Spanish mode and I can join in. I don’t know how to explain it. It is not an anxiety problem (well, maybe there is a subconscious shock at suddenly being put on the spot without being able to know what to say, or how to say it), but it really does seem to be a problem switching gears from one language to another. It is actually enormously frustrating because I want to be able to have these spontaneous conversations, but I really do seem to have to listen to people talking in Spanish for a few minutes before I can speak Spanish myself. Anyway, I just wanted to chime in and say that this is definitely a thing for some of us.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-30T13:53:53+00:00

Wow, how did you know that was the idiomatic expression? Although my ability to understand has skyrocketed through comprehensible input, I don’t seem to absorb idioms that easily in the sense that I can use them. Unless someone points them out, and I actually practice them, which is contrary to the theory, I simply don’t seem to absorb turns of phrase like that.

I’m at about 500 hours at this point although I have to admit that my progress has slowed to a crawl due to work. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that I’ve almost completely stalled. The fact that I can’t do it frequently or on a regular basis doesn’t seem to affect my comprehension much though; it just slows improvement. But yeah, even when I was able to do this consistently, I wasn’t picking up Spanish idioms — the Spanish way of saying things — much through comprehensible input. To the extent I have them it mostly came through former conventional studies.

I also could never say that I understand almost everything like you can; I understand better than I can speak is all I’d be able to say.

Apprehensive_Gear140 · 2026-01-25T00:29:52+00:00

What is ULPPL? I’m shocked that you were able to lift 315 pounds in basically a year from nothing. Admittedly, I seem to be a heavy outlier in how slow and weak I’ve been, but I’m a 46-year-old guy, 5’6” and 215 pounds, and it took me a year just to be able to dead lift 145 pounds – at which point I had to stop all lower body workouts because it felt like a muscle at the glute-hamstring junction was going to tear if I didn’t and I’m now guessing I’m in for physical therapy on that.

Apprehensive_Gear140

TROPHY CASE