[trentgreene]

Hi, worth mentioning that you should explicitly ignore this advice if you’re lifting heavy deadlifts. Eventually you will get to a point on that exercise where your concentric pull can put up vastly more weight than you can safely lower to the ground in a slow manner. Above 3-4 plates and you probably should be dropping the weight. Maybe even less. Your lumbar will thank you.

[MichaelDickens]

> Eventually you will get to a point on that exercise where your concentric pull can put up vastly more weight than you can safely lower to the ground in a slow manner.

I'm not particularly qualified to speak on this, but this does not match my experience. I can deadlift 455 lb with great difficulty, but I can lower 455 lb to the ground fairly easily. And I don't see any physiological reason why this would be true—if your back muscles can support the weight on the way up, then they should be able to support it on the way down, when your body is subjected to less force.

[ehnto]

Gravity acts over time, if you are slowly lowering it you could be expriencing the same force practically as on the way up.

The reason you don't do it for powerlifting is because you're more likely to injure yourself after a max effort lift (like a one rep max lift in competition). Since you exerted maximally on the way up and may struggle controlling it on the way down it while exhausted. All the other compound lifts in powerlifting end at the finish of max exertion so don't have that issue.

If you are only training for general reasons you might not run into it, but if you are a powerlifting athlete doing 5, 3 or 1 rep sets for comp then this is good advice.

[j33zusjuice]

It great advice for exactly the reason you stated. And in gyms that disallow dropping, you give minimal effort on the way down, just enough to not get kicked out.

If you’re hellbent on doing long eccentrics on your low back, do it on back extensions with light weights. I used to do them. I always regretted it the next day.

[atchoo]

I think I'd agree with the OP, the eccentric is more precarious. Weakness on the pull and the bar slows/stops but there is still control, weakness on a slow lowering and the weight runs away from you breaking your form. When you are at 4+ plates then your strength on the day can be a little unpredictable and your 5 rep max can be lower than it was last week and you don't want to discover that in a precarious position.

It's like comparing driving up a steep hill vs. coasting down a hill with just the brake, a slight bump or misjudgement and things get hairy quick because gravity is compounding your mistakes.

[dirtyid]

IIRC you can generally handle 120-140% weight of concentric with eccentric. The issue is HEAVY eccentric for advanced lifters is extremely taxing and fatiguing on body and is suboptimial in how much it can eat away at overall routine volume / practice by pushing body into recovery debt that ultimately drives progression (for many). Singles with 90%+ or supermax (over 100% 1RM) eccentrics when programmed are done with very few reps (often just last rep to pins/safety, anything over handful singles per week is considered machoistic). Otherwise it's reserved for tempo work i.e. 4010 or 40X0 (4 second down, no pause at bottom, 1 second up or X explode up, no wait at top) with relatively light %s that doesn't fatigue for technique work.

[trentgreene]

Heh, ‘drop’ is an overloaded term. I don’t mean you need to release the bar from your hands or not follow through on the eccentric. By ‘drop the bar’, I mean you shouldn’t resist during the eccentric portion in the same way you might during a pull up or curl. Said another way, on heavy deads, your eccentric should be noticeably quicker than the concentric. The bar falls to the floor with you attached.

The other commenters explain why — you’re building up fatigue during the concentric, easier to over round on the eccentric if you resist.

It’s worth caveating to that there are many ways to pull, and I could imagine someone lightening the weight to resist and control the eccentric. But in the the style of pulling I grew up with, a set of 5 reps functioned more like 5 heavy singles in a row, with some seconds of rest and resetting form between pulls. I’ve never seen controlled and resisted eccentrics with that style, and the thought of it lit scares me.

PS. Pulling 455 means that you almost certainly have some expertise in this matter ;). That’s not an untrained pull

[oarfish]

Is there any supporting evidence for this? On the face of it, it seems highly illogical, considering you'll pretty much always be much stronger on the eccentric than the concentric. It's more a matter of learning to brace correctly, I'd say.

> Your lumbar will thank you.

This to me reinforces the unfounded and harmful narrative that deadlifting, or generally low back exercises pose more danger to the spine than e.g. not lifting.