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it's not clear how bad he hurt his back. is he out of commission?

By conventional lifting I mean anything people normally do to gain strength. 5x5, smolov, anything. When you have muscle memory you can do MUCH less and gain strength and muscle mass back much faster.

So what i'm essentially arguing is that you DON'T strictly have to be patient, you can treat it aggressively and then once you're back use conventional lifting. Heavy singles will work but just going light to bring back the motor pattern is all that is necessary.

@LBSS:  While Avishek is correct, it absolutely does not apply to Entropy at all.  Totally true that you can increase a neglected lift with neural gains really easily.  Physiologically speaking this is the same reason beginners can increase every lift initially (all are neglected).   However, this is the "falsest" of all forms of strength.  It's why I would way rather have the athlete who has never lifted and maxes out his bench press at 185 than the kid who spent the last 8 months benching and maxes out at 205.  The 185 kid will be generally stronger in every way and just lacks the specific bench press coordination. 

The unfortunate thing is; unless you compete as a power lifter the movement efficiency component of lifting is useless; it has no carryover to anything but that lift!  That's why if you squat 400 and then focus on jumping for and don't squat for three months your vertical won't go down despite the fact that when you squat again you might only be able to do 350.   At the same time when you quickly (as Avishek mentioned) get your squat back to 400 you won't get any gains in vertical.  Getting the squat to 450 by building up leg strength and then focusing on vertical while your squat goes down to 400 WILL get your vertical higher than it was previously with a movement efficiency inflated 400lb squat.   

Entropy is looking for an ASSISTANCE exercise to increase aid his back strength in squat.   He is totally barking up the wrong tree by attempting to quickly build back up to what he thinks were once impressive DL numbers...   Movement efficiency in assistance exercises is silly; that's why powerlifters do 3x8 or 4x10 higher volume assistance work, the goal is always slow increase of strength through hypertrophy, otherwise assistance exercises don't carryover.  That's also why KF refers to using his assistance exercises as exercises to "add mass" to certain portions of his back to aid his squat.   It's two ways of saying the same thing.  Assistance work helps add mass or general muscle strength to a certain muscle; this added muscle makes related but not mechanically similar movements easier.   Entropy trains like an meticulous and excited postdoc rather than a traditional athlete so he probably won't heed the advice and use assistance work to his advantage; instead he will probably add fatigue to his workouts by trying to quickly recapture neural gains in the deadlift while in the middle of a intense squat cycle.... this won't work.

[redacted]

i'm glad you've decided to abandon near-max-effort DLs from months of not practicing them as a way to improve back strength.

Training
BS 6x127 (PR), 3x130

BS notes:
Trained with coach. He made some major changes to my technique.

So for some reason (I am going to blame Raptor because i'm sure i picked it up from him) along the way I had decided an 'athletic squat' had a narrow stance than normal and that I should keep a narrow stance to make my gym gains carry over. The problem is my idea of normal was not. When coach took my stance (he's a lot shorter than me) by placing his feet over the plates  he had me put under my heel he said, this is much to narrow even for me. But at the time I thought he just didn't understand that i want an athletic squat brah. Then I saw the video and instantly I saw what he saw - my stance was ridiculously narrow. Then as I thought about it some more, I realised coach was right and this isn't a powerlifter cheating on depth - it's an olympic lifter/coach taught by a national chinese coach who is telling me my stance is too narrow. I argued with him at the time saying, 'but it's athletic' and he said yes but, we're not doing squats to emulate a jump, we're doing them to get strong and grow big legs (paraphrasing). He's right ofcourse :-



Now I remember reading somewhere Lance writing that guys with longer legs need wider stance. But I thought that was just cheating for the sake of moving more weight and sacrificing depth by an excuse of height. That the true exercise was a narrow so called athletic stance. Incidentally Kelly starett calls an athletic stance as 'just wider than shoulder width' - which is my after position above. Which seem waaaay wide to me when I take the position and yet that's actually what he'd call athletic.

There are many other things we went thru with coach but this one is the one which i'm going to fix first. What i'm finding is that it's easier to stay upright now. But my depth isn't so good. But one other thing which really changes from stance is my hips are open now. Try opening hips with my old stance - it wasn't that easy lol. So maybe once i've adjusted to this new stance, i'll strengthen the hips and get more muscle contrib from other muscle groups and become stronger for it. Coach's all about the quad strength to the point of focusing on it exclusively. But i dont think it works for me honestly. My form was so shit, but i think that was partly because i insisted on my (very) narrow stance. So have to experiment and see whether his way can actually work for me because it didn't yesterday. His way makes for much worse squats than normal.

Oh and coach wasn't even interested in my front squats, he saw the video of 125kg triple PR from weds and told me how to improve but he didn't spend any time on it. I already know that i'll have to modify my stance though. And then i'll be more upright. And then i'll make my quads stronger. And then it will be a useful exercise, cause whatever i've been doing so far has been worthless, probably.

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Further experimenting with the new stance I just tried and got a perfect ATG overhead squat, balanced, controlled and deep. And on the concentric went straight up. Fuck this is awesome.

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I miss Lance

Wow nice overreaction there. Calm down man. I wasn't seriously suggesting you are the reason. Clearly I was being flippant. But i'm also pretty sure that I read it in one of your posts this connection btw narrow stance and athletic. But that's not the reason I switched over to it. I used to do wider (=read normal) stance squats til October when I experimented with narrowing stance. This allowed me to go deeper and it gave me better leverage making the lift much easier, esp with front squats I found I could hit ATG. So it seemed right. And i stuck with it. But I was just cheating myself into thinking it was better. Actually it took work away from teh quads which is the whole point of squatting. I also don't think it's sustainable long term cause it's an inherently unstable position out of the bottom.

Quote

Now I remember reading somewhere Lance writing that guys with longer legs need wider stance. But I thought that was just cheating for the sake of moving more weight and sacrificing depth by an excuse of height.

So in your paranoia you thought Lance was secretly recommending a wider stance so that you cheat yourself from getting stronger?

No you fool it was I who was cheating myself thinking depth was better when it's not. Narrow stance  gave  greater epth while wider stance has less depth. It's the flip side around, people make a big deal about more depth being better and less depth is cheating yourself whereas for me it turned out exactly the opposite way. The shallower lift is harder much harder.

I did wider stance til October. From october to April I did narrow. And then I hurt my hips (easy to do with narrow stance) and switched to wider stance til late june. Then switched back to narrow and pushed both of my squats all thru july. Now i'm going to revert to a wider stance and make it work. But already I can see it's so much easier to stay upright and drive up with the quads.

Also it's not 'overanalyzing over small detail'! super narrow stance vs normal stance is a huge deal. Instead of making my quads bigger and stronger, by adopting a narrow stance I made it an exercise for the extensors and the glutes!! Is it a minor detail that I turned a mainly quad exercise into a glute one? No!  This means the last year of training was wasted! I'd have got more out of doing half squats lol. That's what it basically means. (And yes vag you made the point in my log about 6 weeks ago but i was seduced by ATG depth)

 

Is it small? Look at the pic! And it's not just the difference in foot width, it's what it means for the lift. Like right now if I do a BW squat, narrow stance and auch knees, dont feel it in the muscles. SW stance, and boom, instantly quads feel it. It solves a whole host of probs ive had where I don't come out upright from the bottom position. I overlooked it til now because coach told me and also because in the past where my power rack was situation I couldn't take a video from the appropriate angle which would have shown it to be a wrong stance. But so many things are now starting to make sense. I had bigger thighs last summer because then I was doing normal stance. I added 30kg to my squats since then and yet my quads are smaller .. didn't make sense. And after re-starting backsquat after my injury i favoured a wider stance to keep my hips healthy, well what do you know, suddenly i was getting epic quad soreness all the time. Which I never had from a shitload of front squatting. All these things are explained by stance.

Hey man just wanted to say I always react in a similar fashion - one realization of something I was doing wrong and all of a suddenly it's X months of training down the drain. That's just not true. Maybe training wasn't optimal, but you couldn't have learned what you learned without that experience. Your time is never wasted. Thinking like that can be really mentally draining. Things get much easier what you can take a step back and analyze without beating yourself up.

This^^^

Look man... it's OK to be passionate about analysing stuff and getting up with better ways to train. Same goes for keeping an open mind (I'm looking at Avishek).

But you have to keep a cool head, stay calm, and if it's the case - then make the adjustment. Nothing wrong with that. Just bring it down. You're at a 10 and you need to be at a 2.