Pull, Pull, Pull!

Some people wake up thinking about how tired they are, some people wake up thinking about breakfast, I wake up thinking about DEADLIFTS. Yup, I friggin love em - pulls of all kinds are KING for total body strength and packing on muscle to your entire body, but especially the posterior chain and upperback. I think that for young athletes, and i've heard other guys like Zach Even-Esh and Dan John, say this as well, deadlifts and all of their variations are a better way to start training the lowerbody for young athletes than backsquats. I know, its total blasphemy, but watch a highschool or college kid do a shitty quarter squat with a ton of weight just to get his name on the schools record board and you'll know what I mean. With deadlifts, there's really no cheating - you either get the weight up or you don't!

While I love conventional pulling, there are many more variations that can be used to jack up your posterior chain, upperback, and grip!

lets look some of my favorite options:
conventional deadlifts
deadlifts standing on 2 or 3 45lb. plates
rack deadlifts
thick bar deadlifts (wrap a towel around the bar if you don't have a thick bar)
thick bar rack deadlifts
snatch grip deadlifts
snatch grip deadlifts standing on 2-3 45lb. plates
snatch grip rack deadlifts
romanian deadlifts

for even more variety, you can add chains to any of the above movements for some accomodating resistence.

For deadlifting, I generally like low reps (2-5) and higher sets (5-10), keeping my rest periods short and moving the weights fast, but every once in awhile I'll throw some higher reps into the mix (especially with the snatch grip variations) for conditioning and muscular endurance - usually as part of a circuit with an upperbody push and pull.