Addressing The Sumo Haters

Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. Before we start the video I want to thank every single one of you for helping us reach 10.000 subscribers. Let's see how quickly we can double this, so if you can find it in your heart to press that subscribe button, please do. So a few days ago I made a video about Jamal after he pulled a 1050 pound deadlift. In this video I stated that he has a realistic chance of breaking the all time world record in the deadlift, which is set by Hafthor Bjornsson. Despite a lot of comments being very positive, the sumo haters had a loud voice in the comment section. So today I thought it would be interesting to go over 5 types of comments made on this video and review the claims made by them. The range of motion police. You will see these kinds of comments on every video that has a sumo deadlift in it. They will criticize a lifter's range of motion with complete disregard of their belt or the technique they are using. In this case Jamal, who is 5 foot 11, is compared to Thor, who is 6 foot 9. Jamal does pull sumo with a narrow stance, but he also obviously has a better belt for deadlift. He has long arms compared to the rest of his body, which causes his lockout to be closer to his knees. Thor, on the other hand, pulls conventional with a wide stance. When we measure the distance between a lifter's feet and compare that to the overall bar length, we can objectively quantify the stance width. The distance between Thor's feet is about 38% of the bar length. For Jamal this is 50%. So we can conclude from this that Jamal's stance is about 30% wider than that of Thor. And the funny thing is that this relatively small difference won't impact the distance from ground to lockout that much. So these comments are either just mindless sumo hate, or criticizing Jamal for being shorter and more efficiently built for the lift. The sumo doesn't count guys. Another very popular comment in the strength community, but these people are probably just confused because the deadlift record in both powerlifting and strongman is held by a conventional deadlifter. While sumo is not allowed in strongman, it is in powerlifting. Sumo is easy. I was very surprised to see how many people in the comments thought that switching to sumo was a free 100kg or 220 pounds on your total. The consensus in comments seemed to be that a lot of strongmen would be pulling over 500kg if sumo was allowed. This is of course absolute nonsense because most strongmen are heavier guys, and sumo requires a lot of mobility. In powerlifting most super heavyweights are pulling conventional simply because they can't get in the correct sumo position. Sumo is not conventional. This is absolutely true. Sumo pullers are not strong. These are probably the most outrageous comments I've read in the whole comment section. They claim that sumo is not a real test of strength, and they claim that there is no correlation between sumo and conventional. One guy by the name of SwoleMF went as far as saying that Jamal could only pull 150 pounds conventional. I am a strong believer that strength is strength, and if the top sumo pullers would be forced to train conventional only, they would still end up on top. The perfect example of this is Kahler Boulum, who recently pulled 900 pounds both ways. Thanks for watching everyone. Please follow Richard Beckley on Instagram. He has been a long time subscriber of the channel, and he has pulled 605 pounds at only 16 years old. I believe he also has a YouTube channel of his own, so I'll link that in the description. If you want to be featured in the next video, DM us on Instagram, and also don't forget to like and subscribe.