Almost two months ago in Death to the Squat?, I announced that Squats will be removed from our Power Points system.
In that post, I never actually unveiled what movement will actually take the place of the squat.
After much internal deliberation, I have decided to replace the squat with the following two movements.
1. The Deadlift
2. The Broad Jump
The Deadlift
In addition to working almost every muscle in your body, the deadlift is also very easy to measure during competition. Either you get the weight off the ground or you don't
Unlike with the squat, there is no dispute whether you got deep enough, nor is there fear on my part of injurying an athlete who lacks mobility by pushing him / her to squat until they go "below parallel".
With the deadlift, those who lack hip and ankle mobility can simply switch their style to the sumo deadlift.
I also like the deadlift because it involves hand strength. (As an FYI, we don't use straps or allow an alternating grip during our testing).
Since most of our members are college athletes and not competitive powerlifters, I believe hand strength outweighs getting an additional 20-30 pounds on your deadlift max.
Broad Jump
I wanted to add a movement that demonstrated explosive power and relative body strength.
Since our gym does not have a very high ceiling, we had to rule out the vertical jump.
In addition, I have seen a direct correlation between vertical jumping and pull-ups with the guys I train. The guys who have a very high vertical jump also can perform a large number of pull-ups.
Having said that, there is no reason to test both the vertical jump and pull-ups, if they both lead the test results in the same direction. (Remember that the Power Point system is designed to balance out the big guys, the small guys, the powerful guys, the explosive guys, etc.)
On the flip side, I have not seen a direct correlation between the broad jump and anything else on our Power Point test protocol.
The top 3 guys in our group in broad jumps are not the same top 3 guys in any other of our movements used during our testing.
The end result
To summarize, here are the four movements we will now be measuring during our Power Point Testing.
1. Bench
2. Deadlift
3. Pull-Ups
4. Broad Jump
After we are done testing the new Class of 2011, I will post their results so you can see how you compare.
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