Aiming for consistency in my Romanian deadlift using the bar bath as my metric, but also looking at hip angle and if my back changes shape throughout.
“But it’s a max effort, of course it looks different”
I’ve never subscribed to the notion that a max effort will look different to a warm up, to me that’s a lazy cop out from people who place more importance on how much they can lift rather than how they lift it. The only difference between a warm up and a max effort should be the bar speed.
When we look at the best lifters on the planet, one thing is common amongst them, they lift an empty bar in exactly the same way as they lift their heaviest weights, every warm up rep is identical to the one before it which means their bodies are perfectly warmed up for the heavy weight. Their 100% looks identical to their 50%.
Think of it this way, if all of your warm ups are different, how can you expect to lift the most amount of weight when your timing and coordination isn’t the same? Each warm up is practice for the final sets.
So with that said, when I’m coaching and also when I’m lifting, a set of 5 is not 5 slightly different lifts, but instead I want 1 rep done 5 times. I’m such a stickler on this that in my own training, I will never pull an ugly rep, I don’t want to train bad habits into my body when things get difficult, I want my body to be able to do the same thing over and over, no matter how heavy the lift gets. This is why, when I'm at my absolute limit, it always looks like there's more in the tank, but I know that with the next weight increase, the bar won't budge an inch.
Don’t take that to mean you shouldn’t strive to progress the weight you lift, you should aim to make sure you add enough weight to force the adaptation you want, but not so much that the lift now looks nothing like the one you’ve trained up to that point.
The same thing applies to accessory work, I see too many people treating it as just another thing they have to do because it’s in their program, but if you treat accessory work with the same respect as you treat your big, compound lifts, then your body as a whole will get stronger and bigger, resulting in improvements to the main lifts.
Remember when the smaller muscles are stronger, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
How does consistency apply in competition?
When you are doing an event for reps in competition, consistency comes not just from how you lift the weight, but how you put it down to reset for your next rep, just dropping a log or axle from height will add time to each rep as you have to reset the implement, letting all tension go on the deadlift means the bar might jump to the side and making you shuffle across, then you you have to get tight again for each rep as opposed to maintaining that tension, controlling the bar and pulling a quicker 2nd, 3rd 4th etc rep.
If you are consistently pulling or pressing the same way, the efficiency of movement reduces fatigue, leading to more reps completed for a given time and more points on the board.
Taking time in your training to imorove all of these aspects will make you a better athlete and see your results improve.
Objectively analysing your training.
If you’re struggling to see improvements in weight or volume, take a step back and have an objective look at the way you lift, are you as consistent as you should be or do you,
Nonchalantly stumble through warm ups because it’s easy and doesn’t require much thought?
Just bang through accessory work with no thought about tempo or range of motion?
Let your form go to shit for the sake of more weight on the bar?
Just dump the bar after each rep instead of controlling the weight down?
If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, then you are selling yourself short.