Mark Bell's Power Project - Is The Sumo Deadlift Cheating? Kenny KO Seems To Think So

Starting point is 00:00:00 Many guys who pull a heavy sumo can pull a great number conventional, but I don't know if maybe I have a sumo bias, but I don't see much the other way around. Yeah, that's the thing I've seen. Conventional is so low back dominant, whereas sumo is more quad. So it's just different muscle groups. So there's downsides and positives to each. To say that it's cheating, though, I mean, I get it. I think people are just having fun.

Starting point is 00:00:25 But I also think, to your point, like a lot of the people that are deadlifting extraordinary weights, sumo, are also very capable deadlifters, period, right? Sumo is cheating. A person who is weak but wants to feel righteous. Shut the fuck up and just get strong. Guys, sumo deadlift, do we think it's a legitimate deadlift? And first off, what are your best pulls?

Starting point is 00:00:46 Let's start there. We got Pete Rubish, the OG conventional king here. What's your best pulls? Best deadlift in training, 920, 920 pounds. Conventional? Yeah, conventional, of course. 871 in a meet. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:59 I don't have a great comparison because I got a 705 regular conventional deadlift and a 766 sumo deadlift. But that was really cheating because I was in a squat suit as well. Okay. And I've pulled 700 conventional and 755 in a meet. Now, real quick, before we get to this video by Kenny KO, and there you are pulling 900 in the gym. 920. 920 in the gym. Yes, sir.

Starting point is 00:01:21 The man's way, the real way. Now, real quick, let play kenny's video because kenny has a lot to say about the sumo deadlift if you're not pulling conventional it doesn't count sumo deadlift i see these kids pulling 700 800 900 pounds sumo i'm sorry but if the bar bends but doesn't come off the ground and all that happens is your knees lock out, it doesn't count. This would be like going and doing flat bench on a Smith machine, hitting a personal best or personal record. And then saying that you're doing a raw bench press, sending some astronomical number. And then on top of doing the sumo, they're doing

Starting point is 00:01:59 the increment of about half an inch. And that's being pretty generous. I must say, I don't want to be the judge or the one to you know put this criteria out there but i'm sorry if you're not pulling conventional it doesn't count i think sumo is legit it's just we're all trying to get stronger we're all you know it's not that serious guys like i used to be very opposed to sumo as well i've been outspoken because the guy in the video, I know him, Tony Sosa. And we kind of even got into it like a year ago because I was like, this is ridiculous. This is a one inch deadlift. Like, you know, and he's got a lot of flack from people and he kind of, you know,

Starting point is 00:02:32 he wasn't too happy about that. And then we started talking and kind of mended things and now we're cool. And I'm like, he's just a normal guy just trying to lift heavy. So is it so wrong that just in a gym setting where it's not that serious that someone's pulling sumo because i think in a meet it's completely different like in a meet you're not going to be able to do that anyway you're not going to be able to pull a limited range of motion he did a meet he i think he pulled 600 at his meet um which it's a far different story with calibrated plates and you can't use straps and a lot of times you know a stiff bar even makes it tougher so in a meet context i think the way to neutralize it would be everyone pulling a stiff bar and then let's go off that.

Starting point is 00:03:10 And if you look at that, you'll see that IPF and USAPL numbers are pretty similar from conventional to sumo. Yeah, I see what you're saying. The stiff bar, because his hands are in close and his legs are out so wide, it's given this barbell the opportunity to bend a lot more because this is a deadlift bar and it has some whip to it. Plus, he doesn't have calibrated plates, so the weights go way, way out to the side, thus making the bar bend more. And that's exactly what we're looking at here. It's not necessarily this guy just limiting his range of motion with a wide stance, but also because of the bending of the bar, that's what's going on. You know, I love sumo. I pulled more sumo than conventional. But this is kind of interesting. And I think there is kind of a bit of a legit point at this point when it comes to sumo,

Starting point is 00:03:56 because just like, you know, people years ago were making crazy, you know, we're getting crazy about the bench arch, right? And with some people with a bench arch, they're able able to get a decent range of motion but there are some people who are really able to push the boundaries of the arch where it's a lockout and then they put it right back and that seems to be what's been going on with the sumo like it's it i don't even know and technically it's following the rules and you will get three white lights in a meat. But I don't know if that's an actual death list. You want to know something else that people used to think was bullshit? What? Jiu-jitsu.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Yeah. This is, yeah. Go ahead. In the UFC, people used to think it was bullshit. Yeah. Like Tank Abbott would get tapped by somebody who's like, well, that guy would have never won if he didn't pull that bullshit. Uh-huh. And it's like, wait, that's part of, you wait, that's part of an evolution of fighting, right?

Starting point is 00:04:48 Yeah. And I think sometimes some of these things are part of an evolution. I understand the discrepancy in this one because the movement is so short. But another example would be like the numbers that I hit. They were good. I did well. I lifted some heavy weights, but i'm in no way in any comparison any capacity as strong as ed cone was ed cone didn't compete raw he competed in single ply gear

Starting point is 00:05:12 yeah and i i competed in single ply gear as well and i i have totaled more than end cone but i'm not stronger than ed cone because i had advancements of like the bench shirt and some of the modern day equipment so So I think sometimes a sport just evolves and sometimes the rules don't go along with the evolution of what's going on. Did the bench rules, let me ask you this. I might be mistaken, but did they make some adjustments to the bench in the past few years? I think that happened, right? They're trying to. They were talking about like making you on rack the weight yourself and stuff like that in the IPF,

Starting point is 00:05:46 but I don't know. Yeah, I think they shortened it to where there's some rule about your elbow has to go below your torso or something along those lines. They've expanded the range of motion, but I think in a gym setting, it's very easy to manipulate weights to be heavier. You can put bumper

Starting point is 00:06:01 plates on where they go out to the end of the bar, and there's a lot more bar whip it makes it much easier to break off the ground but if we're talking within like a competition standpoint with the calibrated plates and stuff it's going to be tougher and you're not going to be able to manipulate things as much. It makes it fair. But I even said

Starting point is 00:06:18 I'm like the number one way to fix all this get rid of deadlift bars. They're never going to do it but if everyone pulled on stiff bars there were no deadlift bars everything They're never going to do it, but if everyone pulled on stiff bars, there were no deadlift bars, everything would be a pretty fair comparison from conventional to sumo. So that's where I stand. If you really want to make it fair,

Starting point is 00:06:32 just do away with the deadlift bars. Keep a seven-foot standard stiff bar, and then I think everything's completely fair. I think also where this gets to be kind of like in the realm of bullshit is that it's like an Instagram clip, right? So people are just, they're doing a particular lift.

Starting point is 00:06:47 It's a particular setup. You know, they're getting the weights that are going to go out the furthest. So the bar bends the most. They're going to use straps and they're going to like show people how strong they are with this particular movement. And even if they get a lot of negativity from it, they're still getting a lot of attention. So they're still able to kind of like win. from it, they're still getting a lot of attention. So they're still able to kind of like win. But to go and try to do that in a powerlifting meet, I personally say, go ahead and like meet me here, whatever way you want, because where you have an advantage, you'll probably also have disadvantages

Starting point is 00:07:16 somewhere else. So if you have long arms that allow that bar to really bend and have some whip to it, good luck on the bench press. Absolutely. I mean, they've done like studies on the bodies of the high level Olympic lifters and some of the Olympic lifters at the highest level all seem to have joint and like arm lengths that are very, very similar. That lends to be able to do some of these movements in easier fashion. It's like if you had short arms, the bench might be an easier movement for you. Yeah. And even the taller power lifters look short almost like even someone like uh dan bell who i think is like six

Starting point is 00:07:49 two or three yeah filled out that body so much that his bench stroke doesn't have to be really far um built up his uh or or ray uh ray williams ray williams huge uh massive massive legs big old butt big old calves and when he does a squat I'm not saying it's a shorter range of motion, but he has an advantage because he built up so much mass that he gets to kind of rely on that as opposed to some of the lighter weight people who might be more slender. Yeah. You know, an interesting thing, and someone had a really cool response to this or an interesting response was lane norton and we'll get to that but one thing that i have noticed is for example jamal browner who pulls above a thousand sumo can also pull in the realm of eight something or i think low nines conventional many guys who pull heavy sumo can pull a great number conventional but i don't know if maybe i

Starting point is 00:08:43 have a sumo bias but i don't see much the other way around am i tripping or is there something there i think that's a good point and in jamal's case he's also like super jacked yeah so some people think the sumo thing is cheating and then it's not really recruiting muscle and it's like well jamal browner is yoked out of his mind and he also is a very proficient power lifter really good at squats really good at uh at bench press but look how much that came off the ground and there's and there's yeah there's definitely a range of motion to it and that looks a lot different though than his 1100 plus i think he's i think he's uh may have lifted i mean now you're getting into the

Starting point is 00:09:20 realm of lifting uh almost more weight than anybody in the history of the world when you talk about an 1102 pound deadlift regardless of how it's done yeah what and we got dan uh dan grigsby dan grigsby right yeah he was smashing some weights too griggs yeah yeah i just talked to him i mean that's not his conventionally he just did a pr of like 965 what about this jamal's got a, his conventionally, he just had a PR of like 965. What about this? Jamal's not that heavy. And he compared to like Hap Thor or Eddie Hall, right? Like Jamal weighs 242. Yeah, that's, that's wild. But question again, do you guys see many high, like mainly conventional pullers?

Starting point is 00:09:58 Do you see many that, oh, here's his, here's Jamal's 953. Do you guys see many go the other way? No. I mean, I, the technique even for me on sumo feels terrible. So I'm definitely not as strong with it. So you could make that argument where a lot of the top conventional guys would try sumo and feel awful. Because it's more quad dominant. How about a powerlifting meet that makes you do both?

Starting point is 00:10:20 Oh my gosh, that'd be interesting, wouldn't it? That'd be interesting. Ed Cohn did a 887 conventional. Yeah. And a 903 sumo. So he might be the grand champion of that forever and ever. So is sumo deadlifting cheating? Let us know in the comments down below.

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Starting point is 00:11:11 So if you want to get your hand on some Vivos, these casual ones, the Novuses are sick, head to VivoBarefoot.com slash PowerProject, and you'll automatically be able to save 15% on any pair of your Vivo Barefoot shoes. Enjoy the video. There might be something said said if you're a conventional puller though that like if we're like play this game in your head guys and try to think of some of your favorite power lifters right there might be a merit to getting fairly proficient at sumo even if you're mainly a conventional puller because it might fill in some holes as far as

Starting point is 00:11:41 your pulling is concerned i'm curious pete since you're such a great puller, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, I always feel like with the guys I train, the mainly dominant conventional pullers do not get as strong if I'm in sumo. It doesn't seem to carry over as much, just from what I've seen anecdotally. But I have my sumo pullers who pull that in competition do quite

Starting point is 00:12:00 a bit of conventional pulling, and that really helps take it off. So it's almost like it helps, you you know conventional helps sumo improve but not necessarily vice versa from what I've seen and maybe you could say it's harder to learn the technique of sumo you know it's more technical there's a lot more of a learning curve and that's why it doesn't help as much. So you're saying sumo people are smarter? It could be it's a harder learning curve conventional is just like everyone else rip pick the bar up it's a lot more simplistic and it's a lot more you can just be

Starting point is 00:12:30 aggressive with it yeah sumo pull puts also like a lot of stress on the hips and for some guys that are used to pulling conventional their whole life and now they're trying to widen their legs out maybe they don't squat with a really wide stance. Maybe they have more of a medium stance. Louie Simmons was a big fan of having people pull sumo in a lot of training and even work their way out really, really wide. But he didn't really care that the guys were doing that super heavy. He wanted that more as an assistance movement. And he utilized that with a lot of pullers that were even pulling conventional.

Starting point is 00:13:04 And thus the reason for the box squat too. Like Louie was a big proponent of box squatting quite often to help build up the hips, to help with squats. And a box squat is done with a much wider stance than a traditional squat. You know what's really interesting about the sumo? When I was first starting a sumo deadlift when I was in my early 20s, I remember distinctly like there was a three-month period when I first started learning it where my hips were burning every single day. The muscles in my hips and my adductors were literally burning because they've never had that type of stress. And after a few months, it literally went away. But I was able to deadlift after that three times a week without feeling any type of crazy fatigue in my body. It didn't fuck with my CNS nearly as much as a lot of conventional pulling did.

Starting point is 00:13:48 Yeah, a lot less tension in the lower back especially, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's the thing I've seen. Conventional is so low back dominant, whereas sumo is more quad. So it's just different muscle groups. And it's probably a little more taxing to do conventional from what I've found, but you have to have greater hip mobility to do sumo so there's downsides and positives to each to say that it's cheating though i mean i get it i think people are just having fun yeah but i also think to your point like a

Starting point is 00:14:14 lot of the people that are deadlifting extraordinary weights sumo are also very capable deadlifters period right absolutely and i think uh you want to pull up Lane's response to this because Lane Norton, I think he's also pulled a fairly decent amount conventional too, but he says, sumo is cheating. Person who is weak, but wants to feel righteous. This is in direct correspondence to Kenny's post. If sumo is so easy, then let's see you do 600 plus sumo. Fucking do it. The top deadlifters are a mix of sumo and conventional because some pull more conventional muscle activation is also similar between the two and then he has a very long text caption holy shit what there's a little bit more we'll make this fast this whole sumo is cheating movement was started by people who suck at pulling sumo trust me no one is trying to make it harder

Starting point is 00:14:59 on themselves i've pulled 700 conventional and my best sumo was 727. Both were hard as fuck. Both required tons of work and technique. Shut the fuck up and just get strong. That's a very lame caption. There's an old story about the guy that – so Westside Barbell was originally developed in Culver City, California by a guy named ed west and then louis just named it after them because they did box squats and they did a lot of the stuff that louis ended up doing with his lifters but there's a story that like ed west uh was watching a powerlifting meet one time and he was an extraordinary powerlifter himself and he just went up to like larry pacifico who's another legendary powerlifter and they saw someone sumo deadlift and they just looked at each other at the same time they're like that's not powerlifting

Starting point is 00:15:48 and this you know these are guys from like the I don't know 70s 80s whenever powerlifting was kind of starting yeah so we should have stopped it back then that was our only hope yeah now it's it's out there well it really wasn't much of a thing 10 years ago even when i look back around the the time of the backyard meet of the century in 2013 there weren't a ton of sumo deadlifters compared to now now it's probably almost more prevalent than conventional or it's like a 50 50 split you think people in the crowd just shouldn't watch it like just just everyone just turn their chair around for a moment you know as this guy sumo deadlifts and then when it goes back to the real deadlifts they just turn their chair around for a moment, you know, as this guy sumo deadlifts. And then when it goes back to the real deadlifts, they just turn back around the other way.

Starting point is 00:16:28 It's just the evolve, you know, how the sports evolved. Everybody pull out their phones as soon as the sumo puller goes up. Check out the Instagram and then, oh, and we're done. Hey, low bar squatting is mainly a powerlifting thing though, right? That's true. That's another way of looking at it. Low bar, I could do way more than high bar. Low bar, wide stance, lean into it.

Starting point is 00:16:46 Low bar, 70 more pounds for me. Versus high bar. Yeah. So crease below knee. That's all you need. That could be cheating too. Oh, yeah. And even a powerlifting squat, you're going to squat way more.

Starting point is 00:16:56 It's a lesser range of motion than an Olympic lifting squat where they're going down as low as humanly possible. True. So, yeah. That's the thing to think about here. But again, what was your homie's name that pulled that in Kenny's video? Yeah, Tony Souza. Tony Souza.

Starting point is 00:17:12 I'm not dissing the dude either, but I can see why people are like, that's not it. I can see it. He took it to another level. But that's the thing. You're supposed to evolve. If this is the rule,

Starting point is 00:17:24 how can I get the most while still being within the rules? And Tony's doing that to an extreme level. Yeah, people are going to break them. They're going to try things that are different. I mean, you've seen it in every sport. The Raiders notoriously used to hold a lot on defense, and then they made pass interference. They didn't have pass interference for a while.

Starting point is 00:17:42 So all those guys that made it to the Hall of Fame, maybe they wouldn't even have been in the Hall of Fame. Jack Tatum and all the other defensive players are famous on the Raiders that beat the shit out of the receivers on the other team. They just wouldn't even be able to do that. I'm sure soccer, baseball, the list goes on and on of the evolution of sports and the different things that happened kind of along the way. Yeah, and I mean, he did, like, theony tony did do a meet and he did 600 so he has done a meet and it looked very

Starting point is 00:18:09 different it's somewhere on there um it's like two inch two inch range of motion deadlifter that did a meet or something like i think that's what the title was lifting ball put it up you might be able to find it but that looks completely different than like his training deadlifts so there's there's different context to everything i don't know if you find it but that looks completely different than like his training deadlifts so there's different context to everything i don't know if you find it on there but there is a video and it's it's quite a difference so yeah it's not instagram worthy but it is meat worthy yeah it just depends on the circumstances yeah everybody's gonna kind of you know manipulate things in training let us know your thoughts in the comments guys is sumo actually cheating is kenny actually right

Starting point is 00:18:42 and is lane wrong what the fuck's going on here with the deadlift? Because apparently Seabum doesn't think that. And Seabum is quite literally everyone's lifting god. So he says Sumo's cheating. So I guess what? Who do we listen to? Yeah, I think he was kidding though, right? He said it multiple times.

Starting point is 00:19:00 Stirring the pot. I don't know. So what if Seabum was to meet Dan Green and see the ham hocks that Dan Green was able to build? Maybe he'd be like, maybe I should give him a try. Yeah. I don't know. Dude, sumo deadlifting helped build my body a bunch. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:17 And it's still a type of deadlift that I can do, get a bunch of fucking muscle activation, and not feel crazy fatigued after. I can move a lot of fucking muscle activation and not feel crazy fatigued after i can move a lot of volume sumo like it's it might be beneficial for people to learn if they want to deadlift with frequency right so it's great to learn it's great to have options and when i was deadlifting often i would do both i would do both sumo and conventional every warm-up every workout felt good and i would pick whatever one felt better for the day and I'd ride that out. So your verdicts, is it cheating or not? Yeah, it's totally cheating.

Starting point is 00:19:49 Yeah. I'll go with no. No? Reluctantly. But no, I've adapted my, I'll say it's not cheating. And we have a YouTube and Spotify poll. So let us know if you think sumo is cheating or not. I'm very curious.

Starting point is 00:20:00 Pete, where can people find you? YouTube, Pete Rubish. I think powerlifting is all about cheating. Get some steroids, do some sumo polls and you'll be able to lift a million pounds. Strength is never weak. This week, there's never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Is The Sumo Deadlift Cheating? Kenny KO Seems To Think So

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