Do you have to Deadlift?
ATR is mostly powerlifting and strongman
At above the rest training systems, our client base is primarily made up of powerlifting and strongman athletes. For both sports, the deadlift is a required competition exercise, so the vast majority of our athletes are deadlifting in some form or fashion every single week. If you’re a fan of Crossfit, it is another strength sport that requires proficiency with the deadlift, and while Olympic Weightlifting doesn’t require the deadlift specifically, variations are often used to train the first pull in both the clean and the snatch.
If you want to compete in these strength sports then yes, you will have to deadlift.
That still leaves us with an important question: If you’re not in one of these sports, is it okay not to do deadlifts?
Key buckets
To answer that question, I think it’s important to understand what balanced weight training should look like. I like the way that Dan John originally outlined it, using these 5 categories, or “Buckets”:
- Press. Press exercises would be exercises like the bench press and overhead press.
- Row. Rowing exercises include movements like the pull-up or barbell row.
- Squat. The Squat Bucket includes bilateral and unilateral leg movements like the Back Squat or Reverse Lunge.
- Hinge. The deadlift is probably the most recognizable exercise in this bucket, but you also have Good Mornings and RDLs here, too.
- Loaded Carry. This bucket includes carries from the front, side, and back.
A training program should incorporate adequate volumes of exercises that fall into those buckets each and every week. The actual protocols that you utilize can vary greatly, but they’ll be built upon a foundation of these movements.
The deadlift is one of many hinge variations
As I said before, the Deadlift is arguably the most recognizable and popular movement in the Hinge bucket, but it’s definitely not the only one. Any time that the exercise requires extending the hips against load, it is incorporating a hinge. The hinge pattern trains the posterior chain which includes the hamstrings, glutes, and the erectors of the back. Most exercises in this bucket also require torso stiffness to control the weight that the posterior chain is moving, so the athlete is forced to incorporate a brace. This is huge for overall health and strength.
I would argue that so long as you’ve got something in your routine that exposes the posterior chain and the core to sufficient stress each week, you really don’t have to train the deadlift. In fact, the deadlift could be more than sufficient to the point that using it in the program is detrimental. The deadlift can trigger pain in the back and hips for a lot of people. If you’re one of those people and you don’t even need it for your sport, then why bother?
If you’re not going to be deadlifting, look for a variation of the exercise that works for you. You can even use a machine that facilitates a healthy and pain-free hinge pattern. Training is meant to make the athlete better, and that means finding exercises that work for the athlete specifically.
Don’t need to deadlift, but why not?
We’ve established that it is okay not to do deadlifts in your training program. As long as you’re exposing the body to the hinge pattern in some capacity each week, then you’re probably following a balanced training routine.
With that fact established, I really have to encourage you to ask yourself why you wouldn’t deadlift.
In my opinion, the deadlift is one of the best exercises we’ve come up with to train full body strength. The brain is forced to bring every muscle in the body together in a coordinated effort to move large loads. The deadlift makes people more resilient to injury and stresses some of the most powerful muscle groups in the body.
In our training programs, we almost always use the standard deadlift as a measure of strength and test it periodically for improvement. We’ll usually only vary away from this exercise if we have a good reason.
Even if the movement is causing an athlete pain, I’m much more inclined to try to figure out why and try to fix it than I am to switch for a variation. You don’t have to deadlift, but I feel that the value of the exercise is so high that I really do what I can to keep it in the mix.
There are a lot of trainers that feel as I do, but there are probably just as many to the contrary. They’ll try to tell you that deadlifting will leave you doomed to injury, and that the risk/reward ratio is abysmal. If you’ve fallen for this dogma and that is the reason that you’re looking for variations for the deadlift, I urge you to reconsider. There is probably a reason that you’re having pain that could be fixed with an analysis of your technique.
Top substitutes: Elevated deadlift
If you are having pain in the deadlift, a lot of times substituting in an elevated variation can be enough to get you training pain-free.
A weight plate holds the bar roughly 7-8” off the ground, so that is where you start the deadlift. That means that the weight plates decide where the athlete starts the deadlift and not the other way around.
Weight plates on barbells came about in the early 1900s. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think they were thinking about the optimal height from the ground for deadlifting when they designed the discs. The height of the barbell is completely arbitrary, so logically you have to assume that there are going to be people in the world that don’t pull well from that height.
There is a broad range of variability in the way that the human anatomy can be organized to form a person. If an athlete’s specific hip anatomy prevents them from the required hip flexion to get down to the bar in a good position, the spine could be left to pick up the proverbial slack. elevating the bar up off the ground can reduce this hip flexion demand and allow for better spinal positioning in the setup. Elevating the barbell a few inches can be enough to allow for a solid start position and pain-free pulling.
I encourage you to visit Paul and Suzee Grilley’s website and look at all of the variations in bone formation possible in the human body.
I recommend trying out a rack pull, block pull, or other lifted variation that will get the bar 3-6” off the ground at the start of the lift and make this your standard hinge exercise. Block pulls are my personal preference because they’re easier on bars and they’re more similar to a conventional pull from the floor.
Top Substitutes: Trap Bar Deadlift
This is another hinge variation that you can use instead of a standard deadlift. Sometimes called a hex bar, the trap bar deadlift can help you to work around pain by changing the physics of the lift.
When you lift with a standard barbell, it is always slightly in front of you pulling you forward. That means that getting into a good position to pull means shifting your center of gravity backward and working hard to keep the bar and your body together. If the athlete doesn’t get into a good start position, they can give the weight excessive leverage over their spine and trigger a pain response.
When you step into the trap bar and grab the handles, you’re line of gravity and the bar’s line of gravity are already the same. This eliminates a tricky portion of the conventional deadlift and can be just the trick to alleviate pain in a lot of athletes.
This is my favorite variation for sport-specific athletes. Most of the time these athletes are on compressed schedules, and therefore we need to get to meaningful loads as quickly as possible. There are certainly athletes that pick up the deadlift very quickly, but a highly effective and more time-sensitive strategy is to skip the conventional pull and go straight to the Trap Bar.
Top Substitutes: Good Mornings
When a barbell is suspended from the hands, the athlete will have to incorporate their lats and upper back to maintain a good position. If these muscle groups lag behind, the spine can fault into a bad position and trigger a pain response. My go-to fix in these situations is usually to lower the weight and work on technique, but to get the hinge pattern loaded while the lagging muscles develop the Good Morning is a great tool.
In a Good Morning, you’ll bend and straighten the hips the same way you would in a deadlift, but the load is on your back like a back squat instead of in your hands. If you’re using standard barbell Good Mornings, then you’ll be using largely the same technique to stabilize the bar on your back as you would in a squat. My preference is to prescribe SSB Good Mornings, or Cambered Bar Good Mornings as they tend to be easier to stabilize.
If you’re needing to scale back further, you can load a good morning with a band, or utilize other implements that offer higher perceived difficulty at lighter loads like sandbags or medicine balls.
Conclusion
A balanced training program requires us to expose the body to the hinge pattern, but the deadlift is just one of many hinge exercises. It is okay not to do deadlifts so long as you find a variation that works for you and your routine. That said, I believe the deadlift to be one of the greatest exercises that we’ve come up with so you should really have a good reason for pulling it if you choose to. Three great exercises to consider as substitutions include the elevated deadlift, the trap bar deadlift, and the good morning.
About the Author
Travis Bogard is the Owner and Head Coach at Above the Rest Training Systems in Cheyenne, WY. He has over 17 years of strength training experience and 7 years of coaching experience for Strongman, Powerlifting, Football, and Wrestling.
He is available for online and in-person coaching, and writes the Forever Worthy Powerlifting Program, Odin’s Boys Strongman Program, and the Duck and Cover Highland Games Program at ATR.
Contact him directly via email (travis@atrtrainingsystems.com) or on Instagram (@coach_bogard_atr).