Octogen Strength Coach – Don Stevenson

Since noticing a strong correlation between deadlift performance and Strongman results I’ve been working hard on pushing my deadlift up.  I’m going to do a longer article on my current 6 week training cycle after I finish up in a couple of weeks and can assess it’s effectiveness but in the mean time here is a sneak peak of one technique I’m using.

While a lot of your improvements in deadlift strength are going to come from deadlifting (well DUH!) there are a number of accessory exercises that can help attack weaknesses in the deadlift and as part of my current program I’ve been using few different things and thought I’d share them with you.

Kroc rows are a great exercise for strengthening your upper back to improve the deadlift lockout, they are also good for balancing out heavy bench pressing and for adding mass and explosive power to your back.  They are named after top powerlifter Matt Kroczaleski and are basically a one arm dumbell row performed with a heavy weight for as many reps as you can with fairly loose form.

For a complete demo here is Matt doing a set of 25 each side with just over 100kg.

Now I’m nowhere near Matt’s size or strength but I’ve worked up to sets of 25 with the heaviest Dumbells at the gym (50kg) and so to progress this movement I decided to get some custom dumbell handles made up.

I called up Mark Roskell from Toronto Barbell and in a couple of weeks he had made me these bad boys which I have christened “Kroc Bells”

With a loading capacity of over 100kg each hand they should keep me busy until I have reached Kroc like levels of strength!

Stay tuned for video in part 2!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 07:43 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.