Why Everyone Can Benefit From The Deadlift

In training, a lot of things come and go in waves, but the belief that deadlifting will hurt your back is one that never seems to go away. It’s worth noting that any exercise loaded improperly or done with poor technique will lead to an increased risk of injury. If you’re afraid of doing deadlifts in the gym, you should also be very cautious of things like sex, carrying groceries, or picking up the laundry basket in real life. These are all real-life movements that mimic the pattern or loading of the deadlift. Since I don’t think many people want to remove sex or the ability to lift the laundry basket, that means we need to prepare our body for the demands. In terms of “functional fitness”, it’s hard to find an exercise that has as much transfer to real life as the deadlift. It teaches you how to pick something up from the ground by using stronger muscles like the glutes, quads, abs, upper and lower back to make one fluid motion while creating tension through the entire body. If you’re wondering what muscles the deadlift targets, the answer is all of them. This is because you’re pushing your feet through the ground while holding the weight with your hands. This is also the same reason the deadlift can be a potential issue for the central nervous system and why more weight or more frequency isn’t always the answer. 

How People Get Hurt Deadlifting

• Improper Loading: Using too much weight that their body hasn’t built up to handle yet. 
• Poor Technique: From not creating tension to not having feet set in the right place. Most people also lose technique because they’re attempting too much weight.
• Too High of Frequency: Whether it’s lifting too heavy too often or just performing a regular deadlift too frequently.
• Neglect Other Muscle Groups: The quads, glutes, hamstrings, abs, and lower back all have a function in the deadlift and they should all be trained to improve frequency. Doing the lift and neglecting the support muscle groups leads to undertrained areas. 

Quick Technique Tips

• Start with the bar splitting your midfoot. Can adjust forward or backward based on mobility and stomach size.
• Squat down to the bar with hips as high as possible while keeping chest up.
• Create tension between the barbell, lat, and stomach muscles. 
• Pull the bar back into hips as fast as possible. 

Helpful Modifications

• If hip or upper back mobility is limited, elevate the weight as much as needed to maintain proper technique.
• You don’t have to use a barbell. You can use dumbbells, kettlebells, hex bar, etc. 
• If you don’t want to increase weight, increase reps.

Benefits of the Deadlift

Our son is 2 years old. Between getting him in and out of his crib or getting him up from the ground, I can only think about how much my years of deadlifting have benefited me for this task. You can try to train your lower back, glutes, and hamstring muscles in isolation, but real life is a dynamic task. That means for every task, we have a specific firing pattern to help with efficiency and decrease risk of injury. 

• Strengthen lower back. The lower back can handle a ton of training volume. This is because the low back is active in every movement from getting off the ground to carrying your groceries in the house. Strengthening the lower back helps with hip extension (standing up) as well as lumbar flexion (bending over) and also makes rotational movement more effective by helping stabilize so we don’t use lumbar extension to rotate our body. 
• Strengthen the abs. To create tension and maintain a neutral spine during the concentric phase requires our ab muscles to be strong to help.
• Strengthen grip. Grip strength is critical for longevity and every person I’ve seen get over a 1.5x bodyweight deadlift also tends to be healthier.
• Lower knee pain. A leg curl or band exercises will never match the amount of work the hamstrings have to do in a heavy deadlift. For our athletes, the deadlift is the lift that most commonly helps to produce more power with each step and also lengthen the stride length. Both of these make running faster much easier. If I were a sprinter or distance runner, I would focus on the deadlift over squatting. 

No matter what stage of life you’re in, I would spend some time focused on building the deadlift pattern to your ability with any of the tools you have available. The longer you have the ability to pick things up from the ground safely, the longer you’ll be able to enjoy more out of life and that’s the whole point of strength training in the first place. 

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