Back Rounding

How to lift atlas stone without rounding your back? Why do these strongmen lift them with improper form?

They trained their back for it you can't lift atlas stones without rounding.

upper back rounding don't mater

You can't.

Roundback is proper form for stone lifting (and most odd object lifts). The knack is in bracing yourself against it properly and locking in your position to reduce the back stress.

But my powerlifting friends keep telling me these strongmen are going to snap their backs.

I sincerely doubt your friends are good powerlifters if they're that surprised about back rounding. Even a ton of powerlifters pull with a rounded back.

Your lardass friends seems to forget that strongmen do a shitton of conditioning work too.

Daily reminder that if they've never competed in a meet then they aren't powerlifters.

>without rounding your back
not possible

>conditioning work makes your spine less likely to experience pressure during flexion
Huh?

Then why is upper back rounding in conventional dl will get you to infinite elgintensity but not these?

No, they will less likely to snap their shit up.

Its because they are strongmen, so they wont snap their backs. If they are powerlifters, they will snap their backs because they are not strongmen.

It won't. Roundback lifting has risks but it's not anything like a guaranteed injury. A rounded upper back can tweak your rhomboids or lats but that's about the worst it can do. The big risks don't really appear until you start doing some stupid unbraced catback shit.

The reason is that elgin is an idiot who mocks any movement he doesn't understand and his fanbase is somehow even less knowledgeable.

Kek. Sounds like you were once in gym fails before

Global flexion is a natural movement and is ok if you brace properly. You cant maintain a neutral spine in every situation in life that involves lifting something, even though it is the superior method for lifting or moving weight. Plus iirc they dont train that atlas stone lifting at high reps

I hope this is bait

Probably to do with the way he seems to be bracing his spine with connection to the atlas stone. Never done it myself, but I'd imagine a strongman would use his arms mostly for pulling it in and then pivot back at the hip or knee, reseat his grip by resting it on his quad and essentially squat it high enough for the platform.

Contrast this with how improper form would fuck you on a deadlift: pulling straight up with a non-rigid lever using only a few individually weak muscles doing the job of both lever and fulcrum.

A proper deadlift described with physics would be pulling down with your hamstrings at the end of a rigid lever (retro-arched back) with a rigid fulcrum (your legs/hip).

So in this scenario the stone+torso is a rigid lever (one solid object, really), and the knee or hip is the fulcrum.

Strongmen often do. You won't see it at WSM or similar because they prefer the traditional set of stones to platforms but stone over bar for reps is a very common competition thing. Also high rep stone loading (or even stone shouldering) is a motherfucker of a conditioning exercise.

You actually want to avoid trying to use your arms too much to pull it in with the atlas stones (with larger stones its almost a zercher deadlift sort of movement while bearhugging the shit out of it to get the stone up into your lap, then you drop down and it becomes more of a front squat sort of movement. You can't get by purely on hip hinge because you're almost always loading to a platform or over a bar around chest height. Smaller stones you have to sort of row because you can't get down far enough to start with it braced against your chest). The real injury risk isn't so much the back as popping a bicep trying to row in a 300lb+ stone.

Rounding your back is much less of an issue than going from neutral -> rounded aka flexion under load or while lifting the object. Strongmen start from a rounded position and move the object through the ROM without any flexion in their spine. Neutral spine is still safer overall but if your spine suffers flexion under load due to leverages or mobility than neutral isn't safer.