The Work of the Deadlift
Notes on how the deadlift can save your life
The barbell on the ground in front of me is loaded with every weight plate I own (695 pounds in all). It’s a rare day for such a heavy feat — heavy for me anyway, and made heavier by the fact that I’m standing on plates while doing it. And so, I grip the bar with my right hand turned overhand and my left underhand.1 The plan is to complete one good pull. A single pull involves moving the barbell and all those attendant plates from the ground to a locked-out position past my knees.
This pull, of course, has a name: the Deadlift. And anyone who has ever seen it about to be attempted has some basic sense of what will happen next. Whether it was early deadlift stars Hermann Goerner and George Hackenschmidt lifting bars or other mechanical contraptions like health lifts during the heyday of vaudeville strength performances or former deadlift record-holder2 Eddie Hall yanking 1,062 pounds’ worth of enormous tires off the ground at the 2015 Arnold Classic, deadlift spectators more than get it: This is heavy; this is hard.
But how can something so easy be so hard? I mean, all you do is bend down and pick up a barbell loaded with weight from the ground, drag it along your shins and thighs until you can pop your hips and lock it out, thence returning it to the ground. There are few activities more universal to human experience than lifting heavy objects, and anyone who has moved boxes or furniture understands on some level what it means to move weight this way.
“It’s one of the few lifts we still see occurring in nature,” says Andy Galpin, a professor at the Center for Sport Performance at California State University, Fullerton, who has conducted extensive research related to the deadlift. “We don’t frequently have to do pull-ups or press things off our chest, but everyone has to bend down to pick stuff up. It’s an uncomplicated movement that’s part of blue-collar jobs — companies are always running ‘safe-lifting’ trainings for legal reasons — and part of the life of anyone who has moved from apartment to apartment.”
We humans have been deadlifting, after a fashion, since long before we walked upright—watch a bear or gorilla tossing around dumpsters or ripping trees out of the ground and you’ll get the picture. Russian kettlebell master Pavel Tsatsouline’s explanation of why the deadlift is the universal lift, the everyman lift, rings true to anyone who has spent years studying the powerlifts: “A beginner needs a few months of instruction by a powerlifter before he can do a decent squat,3 and the deadlift works more muscles than the squat because you must hold on to the bar instead of letting it ride on your shoulders.”
“If you can deadlift, you can be lifted up,” my old powerlifting mentor Rendy Delacruz, one of those overwhelmingly upbeat Texas evangelical types, used to tell trainees at the Metroflex Fort Worth. “If you can pick up the bar, you can pick up yourself, you can pick up your heart.” That sort of cheery talk was water off this blackpilled doomer’s back, but the point stands: Done right, deadlifting makes you feel alive again.
A Golden Age of Strength
“The first thing you ever do in your life is lift weight off the ground,” says champion bodybuilder and powerlifter Stan Efferding. “How does any strong person get started? You pick something up, engaging your body to accomplish it. Over time — and it takes a lot of time and effort to get not just strong but mechanically sound at moving things — you feel how every part of your body moves when you’re performing a lift. But it starts with picking something up. That’s where everyone starts.”
In Efferding’s opinion, the history of the deadlift can be told in two stages: the time before legendary powerlifter Ed Coan deadlifted 901 pounds despite only weighing 220 pounds, and everything since. “Coan’s rise through the powerlifting ranks in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with a period when records fell across the board — in every lift and every weight class,” Efferding explains. “The deadlift was no different. Through the 1970s and 1980s, you’ve got big strong guys achieving lifts in the high 700s and 800s. Then Coan does his 901. As the internet made it possible for people from all over to research Coan’s methods, we began seeing more people than ever before participate in a golden age of strength. That means records will keep being set for the foreseeable future.”4
Function Above Aesthetics
For me, function is the name of the game. Throughout my teens and twenties, most of my jobs consisted of basic manual labor, focused purely on lifting: quarry work in Montana’s gorgeous Flathead Valley, unstocking produce in a Chicago supermarket (during which time the UFCW dunned my modest check in order to reap their dues), loading and unloading packages as a “casual” worker during the busiest time of the year for the U.S. Postal Service. I’d never valorize work like this — anyone who has hauled buckets of rocks during a concrete project or erected a fence knows there’s nothing glamorous or enjoyable about it in an intellectual sense — but I’m fortunate I was never injured during any of those jobs, that my back held strong throughout that miserable grind.
Because if you’ve worked in such occupations, and if the employers are bothering to provide any training at all, a good bit of said training probably deals with avoiding back injuries. Safe lifting practices aren’t always consonant with deadlifting practices, especially when you’re some world-class lifter deliberately rounding your back for training overloads or, if you’re doing strongman, systematically hitching the weight over your thighs. But they can be: Bending down properly, lifting with your legs, and keeping your lower back out of the equation will add decades to your working life. There’s no dignity in killing yourself on a lifting-intensive job in order to impress peers and bosses, but there’s dignity in continuing to collect a paycheck while remaining mostly intact.
The deadlift, however, is as unforgiving as it is uncomplicated — the movement either happens or it doesn’t. Aiming for the former, I take a deep breath to tighten my core and attempt to pull the barbell from the floor. The 695-pound load surges upward. I pop my hip, lock out my knees and put the barbell back down. When it comes to the deadlift, I can’t fake it, I can’t half-arse it, I can’t trick someone else into doing it for me. There’s no gray area. I wanted to lift something heavy, and then I did.
Simplicity itself.
“When you think about a low learning curve and productive efficiency, no other exercise offers as much bang for the buck,” Galpin explains. “And it has only one point of error — the position of the spine, which has to be kept neutral. For trainees, it’s a Day One, Exercise One movement.”
The Antidote to Modern Ills
Even in this so-called “golden age of strength,” complaints of weakness or pain in the lumbar spine are common for people working desk-bound white-collar jobs. The same goes for blue-collar workers who don’t properly recruit the muscles in their legs and back while lifting awkwardly-shaped boxes, instead “arm lifting” these loads to their detriment.
The deadlift is a perfect antidote to such modern ills, fully capable of shaking us free from the slouched-back, rounded-shoulder doldrums of late-capitalist complacency. “Sitting and leaning forward all day are killing you,” says Efferding. “Your endocrine and nervous systems adapt to the lack of strain. Your body atrophies. You need to reboot those systems; you need to rebuild from the ground up.”
Weakness and pain became so unbearable for economist Nassim Taleb, author of the best-selling book The Black Swan, that he began heavy barbell training in late middle age. “An optimal exercise would need to work, in addition to every muscle in your body, every bone as well, by subjecting the skeleton to weight stressors in order to remind it that the external world exists,” Taleb wrote in the foreword for noted powerlifting coach Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength.5 The deadlift maximizes the amount of stress and number of muscles utilized while minimizing the amount of exertion, and maybe more importantly, time in the gym.
Deadlifting, should you have the time and equipment needed to do it, will keep you in the game of life, even if you’re chained to a desk where you’d otherwise find yourself slouching your lower back into oblivion. You needn’t spend hours upon hours at the work of deadlifting — in point of fact you couldn’t, given how taxing each rep is when performed properly.
Form and Variation
The technical aspects amount to little more than driving one’s feet into the ground when commencing the lift, holding one’s core tight using the valsalva maneuver (closing your mouth and then trying to exhale), keeping the bar in a tight path that all but tears across your shins and thighs, and engaging your lat muscles6 to prevent your back from rounding. If you’re experiencing lower back pain and you’re doing this in an attempt to win a powerlifting meet,7 you’re likely only hurting yourself.
“All that matters with the deadlift is maintaining a neutral spine, so unless you’re training for some specific strength sport, you can modify the lift in a multitude of ways,” Galpin says. “You can change the spacing of your feet, the position of your hands, the speed of the pull, whatever. For instance, my recent work has demonstrated that you can achieve extraordinary results with the use of resistance bands.”
“Novices can build an entire routine out of variations on the deadlift,” he continues. “They can vary the pace, the intensity, the frequency. You can get cardiovascular training from a deadlift workout that’s programmed appropriately; you can build flexibility from a deadlift workout that’s programmed appropriately. And the appeal for novices is that picking weight up off the ground is very hard to screw up, in terms of deriving a tangible and immediate benefit.”
For most people outside of the powerlifting and weightlifting worlds, deadlifts and back squats were long thought to be dangerous — we were told ad nauseam that the former could hurt your back, the latter could hurt your knees. Hoary old men at gyms pushing and pulling on the ropes of universal machines would holler over at youngsters to refrain from such nonsense, and Planet Fitness even installed a “lunk alarm” to prevent the activity.
Then CrossFit, the so-called “sport of fitness,” incorporated deadlifts into various workouts, often at ludicrously high paces, and suddenly all the Johnny-Come-Latelys to the fitness world were, in the words of a musclebear acquaintance, “total lower body queens.” The less said of CrossFit deadlift form — particularly CrossFit Games Director Dave Castro’s horrifyingly bad attempt (see below) at a personal best — the better, but suffice to say that churning out repetitions of an exercise meant to be done in economical doses is stupid at best, dangerous at worst. Unlike bodybuilders seeking hypertrophied, visible muscles or CrossFitters deadlifting and Olympic-lifting unsafely, with rounded “cat back” as they chase time and rep numbers, serious deadlifters understand that economy of motion matters.
The Weight Goes Up
Simple as the lift is, it isn’t painless, and serious deadlifters develop seriously good, if personal, habits that are partly intended to keep themselves safe while moving heavy loads. Speaking from personal experience, I used to laugh at people who used a weight belt, believing that if you needed a belt to help tighten your trunk, you were already approaching the danger zone. Now, however, I understand it’s necessary whenever I’m deadlifting above six plates (585 pounds if the six plates are 45s) and often helpful above five (495 pounds). Others, like retired World’s Strongest Man and full-time influencer Eddie Hall, train largely with straps, which have been used in pretty much every strongman deadlifting record of note.
Most of all, there’s nothing that satisfies the deadlifter like increasing the load. Over a particularly fruitful two-year period (2013-2015) at the MetroFlex Gym in Arlington, Texas, I watched my numbers soar skyward: 575 pounds, 600 pounds, 625 pounds, 650 pounds, and finally, a somewhat suspect 675 pounds that I first herky-jerked up over my knees and eventually began doing rather smoothly.
“You might call those numbers advanced-intermediate, but they’re not advanced,” says Efferding, who is world record-setting squat specialist with a deadlift personal best of 837.5 pounds. “Nevertheless, the deadlift — this phenomenally impressive lift from a visual standpoint, because you’re moving a vast amount of weight from a dead stop — isn’t something advanced trainees can do very often, and it’s something I’m especially careful about overdoing.
“The more you load that spine, the more rest you’re going to need. Those huge numbers you’ve seen the best of the best doing — they can’t be done all that often. The greatest powerlifters in the world train deadlift about once every three weeks, and they don’t lift more than 90 percent of their max more than twice a year.”
Even though anthropometry plays a role in the performance of any physical task, the differences are more pronounced with the squat, in which short legs and a huge belly to cushion the weight offer a decided advantage, and the bench press, aided significantly by short arms and a wide, bloated midsection that limits the range of motion. The deadlift, to the extent that anatomical advantages play a role, benefits from three qualities I happen to possess through no effort of my own: long legs (I have a 36” inseam), a short torso (inseam notwithstanding, I’m only 5’11”), and long arms (a 76” reach). Of course, this matters only when one is undertaking powerlifting as a sport, not for the enhancement of functional ability, as everyone going through the motions with appropriate levels of resistance will get stronger over time.
As far as aesthetics go — and so many critical discussions of lifting, particularly among laypeople, turn on questions of aesthetics, on having “the time to look good” — the deadlift likely won’t help much besides your forearms, legs, and posture, three things that pass mostly unnoticed in normie discussions of appearance (but the real ones know, because IYKYK). Indeed, going by normie aesthetic criteria alone, I looked much better in my early teens and twenties, when I walked around at 210-225 pounds because I was wrestling and typically had to weigh in at 197 or 220 pounds. But whereas back then I deadlifted in the mid-500s with a more shoulder-damaging mixed grip, now that I’m 38 and 20 to 25 pounds heavier, I can deadlift far more weight using a much more shoulder-friendly hook grip (and, as noted previously, many of my sets utilize the double overhand grip, primarily because grip is an area of specialization for me).
A Press, Not a Pull
When I press Efferding about what it’s like to move an insanely heavy load off the ground, he answers in a way that helps me better understand my own approach to the lift. “You keep calling it a pull, but it’s not really a pull,” he says. “Think about it, it’s a press, a leg press. On these heavy loads, you’re driving the heels through the ground, pressing through the ground while keeping your upper body stable. In my head, whenever I’m initiating the deadlift, I’m visualizing pressing the bar through the floor.8 Now, with that in mind, try to imagine moving 800 pounds this way. Imagine the shock, the strain, the impact. Imagine how you’ve felt coming down from 600 pounds, for example. You cannot train to deadlift 800 pounds by deadlifting sets of 700 pounds every week. It can’t be done. Eight hundred pounds is a rare and amazing event, and you have to plan methodically to be ready for it.”
Efferding prefers that his attempts at heavy deadlifts be unaccompanied by any lengthy head-slapping motivational sessions or smelling salts. “It’s all so routine for me now and I certainly don’t need to inhale any ammonia or get slapped on the back,” he says. “But you do need to understand why guys do it. They do it because the sharp hit from the smelling salts or from your buddy is so intense that all that’s in your mind is that tingling — plus the thought of moving the heavy weight in front of you. The form is simple, as I said, but as the weight goes up, the mental strain and the self-doubt increases by a proportionate amount — for some people at least.
“For me, after years of following my carefully planned routines, my mind is already clear when I’m getting ready to do a deadlift. I might get excited afterward, but what I’m doing when I approach the bar is always the same: I’m trying to execute a technically perfect lift. If I don’t, all the preparation was for nothing, at least until enough time has passed when I’m safely prepared to do it again.”
Taking Care of Business
My own big lifts don’t mean much in the scheme of things, and plenty of people can lift more — as random online commenters will tell you, over and over again, when commenting on any lift you’ve performed9 — but it means a great deal to me, because I’ve seen how much it helped me when I Karelin-lifted and then choked out the 300-pound neighbor who was hassling my friend, or during the week that I let my then-pregnant wife sit and watch while I moved couches, tables, and chairs into our new house all by my lonesome.
The point, at least for me, is to be able to take care of business, the way a bear can when it topples a dumpster or a gorilla when it snaps a medium-sized tree like a toothpick. Human capabilities at best represent only a shadow of such bestial feats, but they are ours, and we can put them to use.
In the mid-1970s, when my brute of a father was involved in one of his many drunk driving accidents — “rolled a lot of cars in my day and always came out the better for it,” he would tell me — he lifted the remnants of his Ford Mustang off his equally intoxicated passenger. Then deadlifting quite possibly saved a life, even as stupidity threatened it.10
That same father, who spent a life countering self-destructiveness with a strong and seemingly indestructible body, chose to stop taking his heart medication at age 73 and then died at home of a heart attack at 74. This was because, he told me, he noticed his strength failing, and realized that for once he wouldn’t be able to defend himself against the ravages of time or the depredations of his fellow humanzees. Strength, he told me, transcended all the differences that divide humanity: Every single person, regardless of their starting point or their limitations, can for a time get progressively stronger via training — and strength was always preferable to weakness. When debility and enfeeblement beckoned, he chose to let go of what remained of his life.
Clear Your Mind
In the end, that’s what brings together all of the extremes about the deadlift — the beginner and the powerlifter; the fact that we’ve been pulling shit off the ground forever and yet are in the worst shape of our lives; the light lift and the 800-pound one; the CrossFit mania and the deliberate pulls that take place once a month (at most). A clear mind is a necessity as the weight increases, both on the barbell and in life.
Because again, it will reveal everything. “It’s an extraordinary thing to press your feet into the ground and elevate 800 pounds right off the floor,” says Efferding. “It takes everything you’ve got and then demands even more. And you have to clear your mind to answer that call. Pick up that barbell, and show us what you’ve got.”
Taken one repetition at a time, the deadlift connects us with the main current of human life, indeed with life itself. Deadlifting, the act of pulling — or leg pressing, as Stan Efferding would say — a barbell off the floor and then returning it along the same path, can enrich the ever-so-fleeting, ever-so-human (all too human!) times of our lives.11
This is something I do only for “heavy singles.” Otherwise I’ll hook grip the weight, hitching my thumb underneath my fingers, or simply double overhand it, which involves the same hand positioning without locking the thumb. And when I’m really feeling it, I’ll deadlift the barbell with four fingers on each hand, thumbs totally off the bar (I can move some big numbers there, too). The lift — you can watch it in that video — went well enough that former American Gladiator star (and, like rap mogul Shuge Knight and Denver Broncos coach Sean Payton, one-time NFL replacement player) Dan “Nitro” Clark, himself no stranger to heavy lifts, decided to give me some props in the comments.
The current deadlift world record with support straps is an insane 510kg by Thorn Bjornsson, who honestly looked like he had another 5-10kg in him (I assume he’ll eventually hit 520-530 this way, maybe more). The heaviest deadlift done without straps and using a conventional stance was Benedikt Magnusson’s absurd 460kg lift. Either this or the late Konstantins Konstantinov’s 939lbs sans belt was the most impressive deadlift ever done by a humanzee. What bears and gorillas can do, of course, remains to be seen, though many bro scientists have speculated about this.
It took me a decade, though the past five years have seen me very nearly sitting 585lbs on the floor (even if going that far below parallel is nothing more than an “all is vanity” excercise) using a variety of barbells, safety squat bars, spider bars, and the like. I’ll be posting a long essay about the squat later this week.
Middleweight/light heavyweight lifter John Haack, interviewed in depth by “ya boi” here, and youthful South African prodigy Colton Engelbrecht can be expected to push those records into the stratosphere. Engelbrecht may even challenge Bjornsson’s deadlift records set using straps…without using straps.
You can read my interview with “Coach Rip” — a man notorious for his love of “heavy fives” — by clicking here.
Heavy bent-over barbell rows and Kroc rows have done wonders for my lats. After years spent with those movements, my back simply doesn’t round.
Not something I’ve ever aspired to do, given the meager rewards. I’d rather write Men’s Health cover stories at $2 a word about other people doing the same, using my own training as experiential grounding for the work rather than the work itself (the work of lifting weights can pay off, I suppose, but not the way would-be Mr. Olympias and USA Powerlifting champs think it will).
As visualizations go, this one really works. Try it.
Statistically speaking, though, not many humans alive today can deadlift more, and no women currently can. This gets us into that old philosophical problem of the many and the few that Greek skeptics liked to invoke to perplex their interlocutors. Is 300 many, or is it merely a few? 3,000?
This anecdote is even more interesting given that his grandmother, mother, and sister all died in car accidents, as I discussed here.
This article was based on a long reported feature for MEL Magazine and an essay that appeared in The American Conservative.
Thanks, this came for me on deadlift day. Just wrapped up in the gym. Nice to think about it while doing that work.
Finally finished this one and looking forward to reading the squat one.
I only started training those two compound lifts with consistency over the last five years and I’ve been able to keep training both even through pregnancy at a lower weight or adjusted rep range. Life changing, truly.