I am sure that there are more than a few strength and conditioning coaches who will look at Barry’s Deadlift protocol, and the way certain athletes lift, and condemn the approach, because it represents of‘poor form,’ ‘poor technique,’ and a ‘potential risk for injury.’

Barry has emphasized on more than one occasion that such comments and observations are missing the ‘big picture,’ and are failing to grasp the fundamental ‘purpose’ of the lift itself.  There are no 'style' points when the purpose of the lift is related to mass-specific force.

I’d like to approach the issue from a somewhat different perspective, because I’ve actually had S & C coaches look at images of our high school kids lifting, and note that these kids, by dropping the weights and assuming the stance they do, are ‘cheating.’

Here is something Mel Siff said back in June of 2001 on this very issue:

“The matching of a strength curve may not provide the optimal way of increasing hypertrophy, strength or power in training. The specific individual strength curve actually offers just the optimal pattern for producing a given performance output under certain conditions.

For instance, deviations in loading and direction can overload a muscle or neuromuscular process more effectively than training according to the optimal curve.

Certainly, cheating allows one to operate in a different way over one's strength curve and actually produces a different strength curve to achieve a certain activity goal. Contrary to what so many average personal trainers often believe, cheating is not necessarily counterproductive or unsafe - it may actually produce superior results.

Cheating can permit one to produce a very different and more appropriate 'strength' (torque, power or force) curve to enable one to overcome a load more competently and safely. In other words, the term 'cheating' may well have to be redefined.

Bodybuilders know that the term really means using a movement which deviates from the traditional or classical form in some way such as swinging the weights or moving parts of the body to assist one in overcoming 'sticking points'. Unfortunately, many other folk believe that cheating is a breaking of some training law, a serious crime against the body or the unfair use of some method that is frowned upon by the purists.

In Powerlifting and Olympic Weightlifting, the rules of competition DO legislate against certain types of 'cheating' or illegal lifting techniques, such as uneven extension of the elbows, not completing the movement, allowing the bar to stop during a lift, and using series of up-and-down bounces to complete some lifts.

In the common world of resistance training, no such laws exist, only guidelines - 'strict' movements are defined as such, but they are not the only way of doing any given lift. Variations very soon become the lifeblood of the trainee who moves out of novice ranks, so cheating is a highly acceptable technique in the training compendium of anyone who is serious about progressing."

Ken Jakalski