Benefits of Trap Bar Deadlifts for Athletes and the Importance of Task Completion

Today’s episode features strength coaches Kyle Dobbs and Matt Domney.  Kyle Dobbs is the owner and founder of Compound Performance, has trained 15,000+ sessions, and has experienced substantial success as a coach and educator.  Kyle has an extensive biomechanics and human movement background which he integrates into his gym prescriptions to help athletes achieve their fullest movement, and transferable strength potential.  Matt Domney is the Head Coach at Compound Performance. He is a competitive powerlifter in the USPA, 275lb weight class, and in addition to powerlifting coaching, has years of experience in general population training.. High-intensity training is a fundamental component of athletic performance.  For a long time, “strength and conditioning” was (and still is) based largely off of the (very intense) powerlifts.  Training that is more athlete-friendly on the level of exercise selection and rep ranges has become more popular in the last couple of decades, and pendulums of corrective movements and exercise selection have swung back and forth in the process. Powerlifting itself is generally the most polarized expression of how we express strength, and although sport is much different than powerlifting, the pure intensity of the efforts within the sport (are) lend to a key facet of our human nature.  To understand the “middle ground” better, it helps to understand the poles well.  In this case, the poles of the powerlifts on one side, and then low-level corrective exercise on the other are helpful to consider when we are to make an efficient, effective and practice program for the athlete standing in front of us. On the show today, Kyle and Matt talk about variability within heavy strength training methods, look at the balance of high outputs in sport play vs. the gym, speak more into corrective exercise in the scope of higher intensity work, and then give their take on movement screens, warmups and more.  This was an exercise with a lot of wisdom that offers a great perspective on how to make maximal use of training time and efficiency. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, Lost Empire Herbs, and the Elastic Essentials online course. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. To try Pine Pollen for FREE (just pay for shipping), head to: justflypinepollen.com View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points: 2:24 – A discussion of the variables within a powerlifting program, versus a team sport training program 11:18 – Variability in higher rep sets, versus when to use a heavier, more “powerlifting” oriented approach to developing force in athletics 14:30 – Looking at innate force outputs in sport, and then what type of strength training would be an ideal pairing (heavier force output lifting, versus more or a 1x20 style pairing) 19:14 – Kyle and Matt’s take on the balance of “corrective” work and hard work 27:45 – The importance of facilitating changes with a greater load in the system athletically, as opposed to low-load correctives 39:29 – Corrective movements in the realm of powerlifting vs. corrective exercise for lower intensity activities such as running 46:16 – How compressive exercises can be highly “functional” for some athletes, such as narrow intra-sternal angle individuals who need to experience those ranges of motion under load 49:24 – Kyle and Matt’s take on movement screens, and the difference in screening individuals between powerlifting and athletes who require more tasks 59:45 – Thoughts on approaching the warmup given the main movements of the training day “I am probably going to use a lot of bilateral sagittal lifts if I want to improve force output (for team sport athletes), not because I want to improve the skill of the lifts (squat, bench, deadlift), so I will probably use a trap bar.  I might use a different squat variations.