You’ll hear some coaches say, “Bigger isn’t stronger. Stronger is stronger.” Being jacked isn’t the only prerequisite for maximal strength. Otherwise, top bodybuilders would also dominate the powerlifting platform. But I firmly believe that being jacked gives you the potential to be a better powerlifter.
More muscle mass means you’ve got more cross sectional area under the bar for a bigger base of support and more contractile tissue that’s able to put force into the bar. Basically, being huge means you’ve got a bigger army with more soldiers to fight the proverbial battle of lifting the bar from point A to point B.
However, there are three muscle groups that I rarely have my lifters train directly, even in hypertrophy phases. It’s not that these muscles aren’t important, but when you consider the biomechanical requirements of powerlifting and the return on investment for the time it takes to train these muscles, we often find it best just to leave them alone.
Lower Back
There are many powerlifters who will stop reading right here. That’s fine. Put your phone down, head straight to your nearest reverse hyper and tell your training partners what a clown I am. But despite what legions of (usually multiply) powerlifters believe about the importance of lower back strength, I almost never have my lifters train the lower back directly.
The lower back muscles, primarily the erectors and paraspinals, play strictly an isometric role in the squat, bench and deadlift, meaning that these muscles hold a fixed position and don’t change in length (similar to what your abs do when you hold a plank). Ideally, your lower back doesn’t move when you perform these lifts. Your abdominals and lower back work together to keep your spine in one place while your glutes, quads, hamstrings and groin move your legs.
For this reason, your lower back muscles (and all the other muscles of your back that run along your spine) work very hard isometrically every time you perform any heavy squat and deadlift variation. Isometric strength is best developed with heavy weight and long duration, so if you’re performing high-ish reps (e.g. 5 or more) with challenging weight and/or doing things like heavy Romanian deadlifts where time under tension is greatly increased, this is surely building sport-specific lower back strength.
If you’re losing your lower back position when you squat and deadlift heavy, it’s probably not your lower back’s fault. It’s more likely that your core and/or hamstrings aren’t strong enough to hold your lower back and pelvis in a fixed position based on how you’re choosing to start the lift (e.g., you’re starting with your hips too high or too low in the deadlift). You’re better off training your abs and hamstrings directly and/or adjusting your starting position.
Finally, an overreliance upon lumbar extension as a movement strategy for bracing during the squat often leads to technical issues. Specifically, lifters will struggle to hit depth because squatting with excessive lumbar extension and anterior pelvic tilt reduces how much hip internal rotation your body can express, and you need a good deal of hip internal rotation to squat below parallel. I explain further in this video from our Optimizing the Big 3 online course:
So rather than training the lower back directly and purposefully contracting the lower back muscles while squatting and deadlift (i.e., arching the lower back), I find it more useful to focus on directly training the core muscles and bracing the abs while lifting because these muscles have a greater positive impact on the position of our ribs, spine and hips during the squat and deadlift.
Calves
I have to be completely transparent: I’ve always had big calves. As a short, stocky guy, I’ve got good calf genetics AND I’ve been a toe-walker for most of my life, so I basically perform mini-calf raises whenever I walk if I don’t focus on touching my heels to the ground. It’s not fair, but that’s just how it is.
On a more serious note, I suppose direct calf training could potentially improve the squat by adding more muscle mass around the knee and ankle for stability. Also, bigger calves means you’ll get more hamstring-to-calf contact at the bottom of a squat and perhaps generate a little more rebound (similar to the advantage provided by wearing stiff knee sleeves).
However, the calves don’t meaningfully contribute to knee extension when you’re standing up from a squat or deadlift, so you’re perhaps better off spending your lower body days doing more quad and hamstring training. If you feel like you’ve got the time and recovery resources to hit your calves directly, by all means go for it. Just know it’s gonna be harder to get your knee sleeves on and off.
And if you do train your calves, I think it’s crucial you do so through a full range of motion to help preserve ankle motion and not limit your ability to squat deep. This means elevating your toes so you can get a good stretch at the bottom of each rep.
Forearms
Forearms are another muscle group that get worked isometrically almost constantly when we train for powerlifting. There is so much grip-intensive work when we perform any deadlift, press, row, pull-up/pulldown, shrug, etc. And similar to the lower back, the forearms work exclusively in an isometric fashion during the powerlifts. You don’t want your wrists actively flexing and extending when you’re competing.
Anecdotally, adding direct forearm training on top of all the grip-intensive accessory work most powerlifters already do seems to contribute to elbow issues such as medial elbow pain (golfer’s elbow) and lateral elbow pain (tennis elbow). During my days of training professional baseball players, whenever a pitcher was rehabbing an elbow injury (such as recovering from Tommy John surgery), one of the main instructions from doctors and surgeons was to completely remove any grip demands from their training. Only later in the rehab process would we start to reintroduce exercises that required the athlete to squeeze a weight in their hand on the injured side. So one can reason that excessive forearm training may be counterproductive to elbow health, which already takes a beating, especially for low-bar squatters.
Finally, direct forearm training (via wrist flexion and extension) is NOT the same as grip training. If your grip is a limiting factor when you deadlift, doing wrist curls won’t do a damn thing to help you hold onto the bar. In fact, individual finger strength seems to be a greater limiting factor in deadlift-specific grip strength than the forearms, so if you’re trying to fix a grip issue, you’re better off strengthening your fingers (from smallest to biggest) with exercises like plate pinches, a favorite of the legendary Ed Coan:
Return on Investment
There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing exercises to specifically strengthen your lower back, calves and forearms. However, when considering the sport-specific demands of powerlifting, along with joint health and overall recovery demands of a training program, you might consider skipping these muscle groups. They all get a meaningful isometric stimulus from traditional powerlifting training, and that’s largely how they work when you squat, bench and deadlift.
