The RDL is a pet lift of mine, and I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the exercise personally and with my athletes. Coaches should manipulate the lift’s range, load, and tempo using a pattern that hinges at the hip. Every athlete will have a unique pattern based on how much stretch they receive in the hamstrings, but the RDL also has some gluteal recruitment. One thing that the research is lacking is closely studied interventions using heavy RDLs. Carl Valle covered the RDL’s history and current research in a great post here. More systemic than Nordics or glute bridge variations, RDLs allow intensive posterior chain loading. In one movement we can improve posture, hammer the posterior chain, and challenge both the hamstring with eccentric loading and grip strength. This lowering allows the athlete to organize the hinge motor pattern and brace effectively. It has the same thinking behind it as the very heavy kettlebell swing, but with more careful emphasis on the lowering of the weight. The powerful stretch reflex in a heavily loaded hinge is part of the movement’s benefit. These are novel because they’re as much a lowering exercise as they are a pulling exercise. The RDL and the hinge family of good mornings, Zercher good mornings, snatch grip RDLs, trap bar RDLs, and sumo RDLs, to name a few, are a separate class of exercises where the weight isn’t deloaded on the floor. Top-down hinge patterns present an opportunity to load the posterior with less neurological hangover. Top-down #hingepatterns load the posterior with less neurological hangover, says Click To Tweet This is probably why we don’t see much 80%+ conventional deadlift work in many high-level athletic preparation programs. The neurological blowback is too great when athletes take inordinate amounts of time to recover compared to the potential benefits. We’ve searched for variations that allow us to achieve enough stimulus to produce adaptation but allow athletes to do what is most important, their sports training. Posterior chain strength is essential, however, and its potential for load tolerance is enormous. Teaching the Hinge Movement by Training the RDL While these are challenging, they often lack substantive loading and are limited by instability the opportunity is missed to load the system with an intensive vertical pulling exercise. Standing single leg posterior chain variants aim to bring a sports-specific facet to posterior chain movements. These movements have high output, but the wellspring of development in eccentric and isometric qualities are not particularly challenged with these lifts. Nordics and hip thrusts have been at the center of posterior chain training for some time, as has unilateral vertical pulling.īilateral vertical pulling is often the domain of Olympic lifting coaches. We also see a lack of deadlifting in seemingly high-level athletic programs. Another concern is that these movements are largely concentric only. When technical maturity is low, the sole aim of pulling off the floor can become getting the weight up by any means, which obviously is risky.ĭuring athlete development, we often reach a point where continued improvement with absolute load lessens improvements and enhances risk. Pulling from the floor is a fundamental activity that most athletes should master early in their career, but it’s not without its limitations. Our training model emphasizes intensive stimuli and movements to challenge multiple contractile properties, and the RDL is an essential component. To create a training trifecta and round out our program, I also use the Romanian deadlift (RDL). In a previous article, I discussed the hand supported split squat (HSSS) and the back squat to train lower body pushing patterns neurologically and structurally.
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