Deadlifts don’t have to be done from the ground. The plate height isn’t ‘optimal’, it was originally designed to protect olympic lifters from having their heads crushed if they dropped the bar from overhead. Unless you’re training for a specific lifting sport, you can and should adjust ALL exercises to suit your you.

There's more to training than building muscle But if that’s all you care about, that’s cool. It’s a lot of fun. But let’s clear a few things up 👇🏻 1️⃣ Looking at “what the pros do” isn’t really as strong an argument as people make it out to be. There are many exceptional pros out there doing fantastic things based on sound principles, logic and reason. But there's also just as many who have no idea how they got there, or have such exceptional genetics they could have gotten there playing table tennis. At the end of the day, the thing they all share in common is finding something they enjoy that works for them and working hard. 2️⃣ “The wheel” has been in a constant state of reinvention for a lot longer than you probably realise. If you saw what the real ‘basics’ were in the golden, silver and bronze era of lifting from people like Arnold, or Franco, or Gironda, Grimek and Anderson you might just have an aneurysm. 3️⃣ Don’t hate. Seriously. We’re all here because we love lifting and fitness. Period. I’m struggling to think of a more asinine thing to attack than how someone likes to train to stay active and work on themselves. If it’s not harming others, or willingly spreading misinformation, live and let live. Different story if it’s being sold as elitist gospel and what you MUST do. Then by all means, hate away. They probably have it coming 🫡

This is one of my favourite upper body mobility exercises and where I start many of my upper days. You’ll feel these right down low where the lats insert into the hips. I call them Triangle Lat Pulls since my inspiration for these came from the triangle pose in yoga, but some of the greats im bodybuilding have variations of these theyve been using for decades. Load isn’t the goal. Use enough, but keep it lighter and move fluidly as opposed to trying to muscle the weight around and keep things stiff and rigid. Try all of my programs completely free on Ganbaru - just head to my profile 💪

Lift weird things, build weird strength👇🏻 Heavy bag lift & toss - 2 reps, EMOM for 10 mins. No matter how strong I got on traditional barbells or machines, once I got on the mats in BJJ or in awkward positions in life, I’d be exposed for my lack of strength. Gradually exposing myself to more odd lifts with heavier loads and workloads over the past few years has built a ton of strength and body awareness that has been lacking from my training. Plus, it’s a lot of fun to mix it up like this a few times a week. This is my first session back to the heavy bag, so I’m keeping it to a lower intensity, endurance based piece with the EMOM. Once I’m able to creep this up to around 4-5 reps per minute with a comfortable RPE, I’ll fill the bag further, and the work continues 🫡

One from my bodybuilding days. This is one of several drills I’d use to unlearn the habit of pulling with my rear delts, arms and traps and finally unlock my lats 👇 Use the "stiff arm pulldown" and drive elbow towards hip/knee, then slowly transition into a more typical row/pulldown motion without losing the same focus.