Off The Floor is a dead-lift-specific program that also promotes general muscle growth due to its highly demanding workouts. Its effectiveness rests upon the unique “biofeedback training” technique which allows for a fine-tuned customization of reps, sets, and stances based on your own response.
While not a complete muscle-building program, it is as good as it gets towards general conditioning, as it targets a large number of muscle groups, thus inducing general muscle gains.
It can be used standalone for sure, but also as an additional schedule to your current muscle-building program if you lag behind in the dead-lift or need to give your body the extra kick necessary in order to trigger muscle gains again and overcome plateaus.
Stay tuned to find out how this program by dead-lift world record holder and author David Dellanave works, what it can do for you, and how.
POST CONTENTS
Who Is It Right For?
Off The Floor is firstly for anyone seeking more options for pulling the bar off the floor and developing more dead-lift strength.
However, the program is also a good all-rounder for general body strength, helping progress in any other lift thanks to its great carry-over effect.
Because of this, the training guidelines could be used standalone or in addition to a few other compounds movements.
Despite the toughness of the workouts, Off The Floor is not athlete-specific and can be easily followed by regular people because of its time-efficient schedule, so as to let you free to follow your life commitments.
How Does Off The Floor Work?
The program is a blend of all the knowledge and training experience as used by David Dellanave to increase his own dead-lift from 245 lbs at 168 lbs bodyweight to a world record-breaking 605 lbs at 205 lbs body weight, steroid-free.
It wasn’t a walk in the park to start with, and he struggled for a long time with all types of training regimens, workout schedules, techniques, repetitions and sets schemes, getting injured along the way.
According to him, he tried the Westside Barbell’s system, high volume training, low volume with fewer sets, skill practicing with light loads, high intensity with heavyweights, and Russian gurus weight lifting programs, all without much success.
He then switched to a completely different approach, which is the basis of the Off The Floor program. Basically, the plan involves a higher frequency training with a lot of variations in movements, reps and volume, high loads, low loads, high reps, low reps, full-range movements and partial range with higher loads, and so on.
The result is a substantial amount of total volume distributed regularly through the week with an ever-changing stimulus, but without going into overtraining or under training.
In particular, the loads, exercises, and repetitions/sets, or volumes, are constantly changed on a workout by workout basis, but not randomly.
There is a method in the constant changes in the program which have nothing to do with the muscle confusion theory of old.
Each workout is preceded by an assessment called “biofeedback”, which helps you quickly determine the best exercise, load intensity, and repetition scheme for that particular workout, maximizing your muscle strength and gains in the long run.
The Biofeedback Approach
The idea of biofeedback came to Dellanave from a chance meeting he was introduced to many years back.
He was invited to a seminar about a new, experimental technique. This technique was about figuring out the type of training your body needs for any particular workout depending on your body feedback at that specific time.
This technique would allow you to figure out exactly the loads, reps, and sets required on that day for optimal gains and progress, minimizing the risk of injuries along the way while maximizing strength and muscle building in the long run.
The biofeedback technique David Dellanave refers to is not the complicated and costly version that requires expensive gear or software applications to connect to your smartphone.
Instead, it is a simple self-assessment that you go through at the start of each and every workout in order to determine your starting flexibility and range of motion for a few key movements.
Once you have established your temporary range of motion for that day, you perform a starting set with a light load, then cross-check your range of motion back again to see whether it has improved or stayed the same.
Depending on your response, you then go on increasing the load (or not) and repeat the process until you find out whether you can work out hard with high loads or whether you should back off or even change stance or exercise.
This way, you apply the correct training stimulus to your body for each workout, avoiding overtraining as well as under training, while optimizing gains and reducing the chance of injury.
It’s a fascinating approach that has been used successfully by many athletes and customers and has allowed David Dellanave to establish a world record in his class for the deadlift.
To clarify the idea below is a video presentation by David himself on what biofeedback is all about.
About David Dellanave
David Dellanave is a former computer programmer who wrote the Adaptifier software, the free training tracker designed to track progress and make workout decisions accordingly.
He started working out the regular way, in a commercial gym with loads of machines and free weights, achieving modest gains until he turned his attention to kettlebells and eventually to strength training.
He took certifications in BioMech 1/2/3/ for physique transformation, pain resolution, performance enhancement, then BioPsych for improving quality of thought, and BioChem for understanding nutrition.
Above all, he has mastered the biofeedback technique, implementing it in his own training and that of his clients, opening the Movement Minneapolis in Plymouth in 2010 and a second gym later.
In his gyms, he and his team incorporate the biofeedback technique to help clients achieve their full potentials by adapting each workout to their body response for that particular day.
As you can see, David Dellanave is super-qualified to coach people on deadlifting and strength training, as not only has he the knowledge and experience, but also world records in deadlifting to show for.
Off The Floor Contents
Off The Floor is a large digital program with several PDFs and a video library. No physical shipment occurs, just downloads through links. There are 9 components:
Off The Floor Main Manual – The foundation of the program, a 100-page manual with the theory part.
The Workout Schedules – There are 2 schedules, an 8-week blueprint for beginners and intermediates and a 12-week for advanced trainees. All the workouts are preceded by the biofeedback assessment.
A Video Library – Video tutorials of the exercises AND the biofeedback as performed on real-life test clients.
Grip Challenge Booklet – A manual addressing specifically grip strength and how to improve it, very important when lifting 100s lbs. It is often the grip the limiting factor in heavy lifting.
Exercise Library Reference Manual – All the deadlift variations are explained in detail with pictures and descriptions, their pros and cons.
Dead-lift Gear Guide – Suggestions on the most suitable tools of the trade to help you through effective workouts.
Biofeedback Training Guide – An additional 9-week Biofeedback Training course, a step-by-step explanation of the Biofeedback Training system designed to fully grasp it.
Supplement Guide – A simple manual filtering out the good supplements worth your money and leaving out the useless ones.
Bret Contreras’ Dead-lift Coaching – Expert of the biomechanics of the glutes and hip Bret Contreras gives an extra insight on the dynamics of the dead-lift, an extra valuable source of knowledge to help understand the potential and limits of the deadlift movement.
Off The Floor is simply a benchmark program for the dead-lift created by dead-lift world record holder David Dellanave. It is fully comprehensive, professional, with many materials to go through, and is notably based on the “biofeedback training” technique.
The biofeedback makes this program totally flexible and customizable for each and every workout, as this method helps you find out what is the best and most effective training approach for any workout session, finding out the correct loads, repetitions, sets, stances, and exercises, depending on your response.
Off The Floor minimizes injury while maximizing your strength and muscle gains potential with a time-efficient schedule, making fast progress possible.
It is not just a dead-lift program, but also a general strength and muscle-building plan because of its strong carry-over effect on anabolism and growth, but it could also be used with other upper body compound movements.
The fact that was written by a dead-lift world record holder who puts his money where his mouth is, makes Off The Floor a standard benchmark to refer to for dead-lifting and strength in general.
My name is Jay Fielding. I gained an interest in fitness since I was a child, and eventually developed my passion into a career path. I am now a Certified Personal Trainer with a natural ability to program customized body recomposition and motivate people in achieving their goals, be it gaining muscle or losing fat.
