The Deadlift: An exercise that is used to develop the posterior chain. A fantastic exercise, but one that is not essential to progress with your physique goals.
Below are the factors that influence whether you should and shouldn’t be deadlifting, and what your deadlift will look like.
Biomechanics: Your limb and torso length and proportionality can determine whether or not you are going to be a great deadlifter and there is nothing you can do about this. This is where adjusting your stance and other variations may become applicable.
Injury: Previous or current injury may prevent an individual from being able to deadlift correctly and without pain.
Mobility: Your mobility can massively effect how your deadlift looks and wether or not you can attain a good set up position and maintain posture throughout the movement.
Goals: Do you really want to dead lift? If you want to deadlift to improve your deadlift that is great, but if you are not doing it for a sport then remember the rules of that sport don’t apply. Make sure you are goal orientated with your exercise selection, so maybe there are exercises more effective for you to be doing towards your particular goal?
We have many clients that won’t go any where near a deadlift for months until they are ready to do so. Even then remember deadlifting is a skill. It is a very advanced and complicated exercise, so spending hours coaching a dead lift from the get go is a massive waste of time when the client has come to me to lose fat or build muscle. That time could be spent on things much more important. Same goes for Olympic lifts. So if your trainer has you spending all session teaching you crazy complicated lifts from your first session then you need to ask them their rationale behind their exercise selection.
The deadlift can be a great exercise but just make sure that if you are doing it you have considered all the points above. Also, if you are going to use it in your programming then make sure you are doing it right, so we will be posting a video on how to set up the deadlift soon, so stay tuned
