Middle Aged Muscles

Picking Your Secondary Variations

If you’re lifting for strength, your main movers are easy to identify. You’ll never find a person who has a good squat, deadlift, bench and overhead press, yet isn’t strong. While some powerlifting programs will keep you doing nothing but the comp lifts, I’ve always been an advocate of using variations within your programming. Before we talk about what variations, lets talk about why.

Different variations stress different parts of your body:

I’m going to name 3 squats; high bar, low bar, and SSB (safety squat bar). They are all squats, they all start with you standing up with a bar on your back, lowering yourself to depth and pushing back up, yet they’re all different enough to where your maxes on the 3 will be completely different. Why? The subtle change in each makes it so different muscle groups are activated and emphasized.

The slight differences between each variation can be advantageous if used correctly within a program. For example, if you have weak quads switching to high bar for a cycle will put more emphasis on them than a low bar squat. Weak upper back? The SSB will take care of that.

More importantly, by switching these variations you’re not staying within the same movement pattern 100% of the time which is good for your joints. Westside Barbell uses the switching of variations as a way to workout for longer without deloading. I myself find I’m able to go 10 or so weeks without a deload if I continue to switch variations where I need to deload ever 4-5 if I don’t.

The bottom line is, variations are good.

Picking your variation:

This is the most common question when it comes to variations “After I squat I’d like to deadlift, but not my main deadlift, how do I pick a variation?”. Its a common question but its a good one with a simple answer “you want to pick variations that attack your weaknesses”.

A follow up may be “I’m new in the gym, I don’t know how to tell my weak points” which is fair, so I can rephrase this to make it easier “try a few variations and do the one’s you’re worst at”.

If you consistently mix enough work on your main lifts with variations you are horrible at, I promise you that you’re going to get stronger. For example my next training cycle is going to feature a bunch of 4″ block pulls as a deadlift variation because I can pull more off the floor than I can off of 4″ blocks, clearly this points out a weakpoint in my deadlift movement I need to improve.

My favorite variations

Now that we’ve had a brief explanation of how and why, lets talk about what my favorite variations are, I figured 2 per main lift would be ample, but please go out and explore beyond what I give.

Bench Press:

I was nice enough to throw in a couple YouTube links from other creators to talk about these.

Why do I like them? With the wide grip Larsen it takes my legs out of the movement and focuses on the upper body. The wide grip and legless set up also makes your core work more to stabilize, thus improving stability. The wide grip hits my pecs more which helps me be faster off my chest.

The axle floor press helps me in during my lockout and builds my delts. I use the axle for this as squeezing the thicker bar can be good for your grip and help your elbows.

Squat:

Getting ahead of this… I love the SSB for a multitude of reasons, its became the Swiss Army Knife to my home gym, but a standard SSB Squat is extraordinarily beneficial even without my personal bias. For starters the handles allow you to keep your shoulders in a neutral position meaning that this bar is tailor made for anyone with shoulder issues. The weight being set slightly ahead of you forces you to work the entire time to not be pulled forward, thus activating your erectors and your upper back. Also, if you look at the very bottom of the SSB squat, you’re almost in a conventional deadlift position.

Front squats I hate, I’m not built for them as what I have of legs are all femurs and my shoulder mobility sucks, so front rack position is difficult. Still, when I front squat regularly, my comp squat and deadlift go up. In addition to building your quads, the front squat and a ton of demands on your core and glutes which transfer over to pretty much everything. The vertical bar path also helps cue you to not hunch your back and keep your spine in a rigid position throughout the lift.

Deadlifts:

Notice I pick variations that both include deficits and are also done by 2 of the greatest deadlifters of all time…

Starting with the stiff legs, nothing blows up my hamstrings like these do. Every time I’ve hit a deadlift PR these are in my program in the weeks leading up to it. By both lengthening the motion and taking your quads and hips out of it, you come up with a movement pattern that is purely hamstrings and erectors. This should make you extremely strong in the top half of the lift, though the deficit helps you on the floor too.

The banded deficits are fun, though they sometimes feel like a completely different lift. Between the bands and the deficit you are forced to be extremely fast off the floor or you miss the lift. Because you have bands and the top is overloaded, you’ll also have to work harder to lock out, so you really get the best of both worlds here.

Overhead Press:

You can argue that push press is its own entity but I’d rather view it as a variation of the overhead press. By adding leg drive in you essential allow yourself to lift more weight which overloads the top of the motion. Because of this you’ll get much stronger at the lockout portion of your overhead press and will be able to stabilize heavy weights. I’d also advocate that its okay to push press the last 1 or 2 reps of an overhead press set if you’re just looking to get more work in.

The Bradford press is the exact opposite, this will build your starting power and transferring from in front of to behind the neck will help you build shoulder mobility. Because this is a short range of motion it works well with high reps. If you want to get started with it, try it as a burnout movement on press day with just the bar. Go to failure and see how long it takes you to get there.

Conclusion:

I named just a small handful of variations, try them, try other ones, just find what works best for you.

Remember my rule of thumb, if you suck at it, you should be doing it more…

biteymax22

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