Opinion: Stop Doing Deadlifts if You Want to Build Muscle
At the risk of making four-time World’s Strongest Man Jón Páll Sigmarsson turn over in his grave, I’ll say it: Deadlifts kind of suck for building muscle. Sigmarsson (who passed away in 1993) famously said, “There is no reason to be alive if you cannot do deadlifts,” and in a way, he’s right.
Just about nothing feels better than the deep, resonant thud of dropping a new deadlift PR back down on the platform in a crowded gym. It tickles something deep in the lizard part of your brain that compels you to hit the weights in the first place.
But that doesn’t mean that the deadlift — mind you, that’s the pick-it-up-off-the-ground-and-you’re-done deadlift, not any of its variations — is a particularly good hypertrophy exercise.
Pros and Cons of Deadlifting for Muscle Growth
Despite what some of the louder charlatans in the strength training community preach from their pedantic pulpits, there’s no such thing as a universally poor exercise. But you can qualitatively assess the merit of any movement by weighing it against the factors that influence hypertrophy: (1)
- Mechanical tension
- Metabolic stress
- Muscle damage
Most contemporary exercise science research agrees that mechanical tension is the primary driving force behind muscle hypertrophy. And because deadlifts generate buckets of mechanical tension, they are the best muscle-building exercise. Case closed? Not quite.
The Bad
Deadlifts generate a lot of mechanical tension, which makes them a solid muscle-building movement on paper. But there’s a real-world opportunity cost behind every movement you add to your workout routine. When it comes to practicality, the deadlift fails to measure up.
- Deadlifts take a long time to prepare for and perform (especially if you lift a lot of weight).
- Deadlifts engage a lot of muscle tissue, but most of those muscles contract isometrically.
- Deadlifts are exhausting, but not in in a way that facilitates a lot of muscle growth.
Deadlifts Take Too Long
If the deadlift was scientifically optimized for muscle growth (more on that later), you could spend your 90-minute workout entirely on pulls and consider it time well spent. But the reality is that prepping for and performing heavy pulls takes time, particularly if you’re working around an injury, need to warm up for the technically-demanding sumo deadlift, or have a max that starts with a “five” or “six.”
There’s no shortcut to take here, either — common time-saving bodybuilding techniques like supersets or cluster sets won’t prepare you for heavy deadlifts, and jumping straight into a heavy set of pulls without properly warming up is an awesome way to make use of your health insurance coverage.
So you do your 5-10 minutes of cardio like a good gym rat. Then, because you care about your deadlift technique, you perform a priming or activation drill. Then a set of deadlifts with 135. Then a set with 225. And another. And then another.
Before you know it, you’ve clocked an hour in the gym and have little in the way of high-quality muscle-building work to show for it.
In the time it takes to perform multiple sets of one exercise, you could instead bang out two or three different, more direct exercises: Snatch-grip RDLs for your upper back and hammies, seated cable rows for your lats and mid back, or even the tried-and-true barbell row.
Deadlifts Don’t “Work” the Muscles You Want To Grow
Powerlifters obsess over shaving every possible millimeter of range of motion off the Big Three (the squat, bench press, and deadlift) because shortening their range of motion improves leverage and lets them lift more weight. However, bodybuilders usually want to achieve the exact opposite out of their hypertrophy training.
Martin-Fuentes et al. studied muscle activation during the deadlift. They recorded some mostly unsurprising data: Plenty of activation from the hamstrings, glutes, lower back, and, to a lesser extent, quads. (2)
However, muscular activation, even against immense force, doesn’t necessarily create muscle growth. You could load up 1,000 pounds on a barbell, attempt to deadlift it (Eddie Hall, this section isn’t for you), activate every fiber of muscle in your body, and not build a lick of mass. Nevermind the fact that almost everyone eschews the eccentric half of the deadlift, despite the eccentric phase of weight lifting being widely regarded as the most conducive to hypertrophy.
And despite what some deadlift purists love to say, the pull doesn’t do much for most parts of your upper back, and the “muscle activation” case for the lats is paper-thin. The latissimus dorsi perform adduction and extension of the upper arm. This motion occurs very minimally when you deadlift.
[Related: Best Exercises for Long-Length Partial Reps]
In fairness, tension-in-the-stretched-position is currently considered to be the magic bullet for muscle growth. (3) That’s exactly the treatment your traps get when you deadlift as they attempt to keep your arms in their sockets, so the deadlift may retain value as a trap exercise.
They Require a Ton of Energy
If you’ve ever done a high-intensity deadlift workout before, you know how draining heavy pulls can be. Effects range from “woof, I’m tired everywhere” to “I feel like mashed potatoes and need to lay down ASAP.” If your primary goal is muscle growth, general fatigue isn’t what you want.
Starting your hypertrophy workouts with heavy deadlifts is a great way to ensure you’re running on empty for the remainder of your session. Tell me with a straight face that you can apply maximal effort to your bent-over rows when your lower back is fried from deadlifting — I bet you can’t.
And that’s just the acute physiological fatigue. Mental fatigue or cloudiness also comes with the territory and can be equally detrimental to your workout, reducing your ability to focus and concentrate on other important movements.
The Good
No movement is entirely meritless. Deadlifts might be mediocre for muscle growth in a laboratory setting, but real gains are made in the real world. And, in fairness, deadlifts have plenty of tangential benefits to hypertrophy:
- Deadlifts teach you how to lift properly.
- Deadlifts build transferable strength.
- Deadlifts are fun.
The deadlift is the fundamental hip hinge movement. It’s the bedrock upon which your form on many other exercises is built — a good deadlifter will have the postural strength to do the barbell row properly. Those benefits don’t flow in the other direction nearly as well.
Deadlifts also have more practical carryover to your everyday life than almost any other single movement pattern and let you get in some valuable experience with really heavy weights. If you pull four plates, a three-plate Romanian deadlift won’t feel like the weight of the world in your hands.
I’m also not trying to yuck anyone’s yum here. Deadlifts are just plain fun to do, and you can only get so excited about another set of seated machine rows. If deadlifts get you in the gym consistently and, more importantly, make it easy to work hard, keep doing what you’re doing. “Optimal” be damned.
If Deadlifts Suck for Muscle Growth, Why Are There So Many Jacked Deadlifters?
Because science is for nerds, and deadlifting is hardcore. At least, that’s what I’d say if I were possessed by the spirit of Sigmarsson himself. In reality, it’s sort of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Are deadlifts, in a vacuum, an exceptional hypertrophy exercise, according to contemporary evidence-based standards? Not particularly.
Do deadlifts make you strong in a way that applies to other, “better” exercises? Yes. Do beginners often perform deadlifts early in their lifting careers when they are almost comically susceptible to muscle growth? Yes. Are deadlifts a damn good time, most of the time? Yeah. Do world-class powerlifters hammer the hell out of back exercises like rows, pull-ups, and pulldowns behind the scenes? You can bet your backside that they do.
These factors contribute circumstantially to the deadlift appearing as the ultimate back-builder. Is it actually? In theory, no. But as J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “Theory can only take you so far.”
If you don’t deadlift, take a few years and work up to a double-bodyweight pull, then see if your back is any bigger (it probably will be). But if you habitually start your back workouts with deadlifts and can barely muster the gusto to attack your other exercises afterward, try putting pulls on the sidelines for a few months. You might just kick your back gains into high gear.
References
- Krzysztofik M, Wilk M, Wojdała G, Gołaś A. Maximizing Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review of Advanced Resistance Training Techniques and Methods. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Dec 4;16(24):4897.
- Martín-Fuentes I, Oliva-Lozano JM, Muyor JM. Electromyographic activity in deadlift exercise and its variants. A systematic review. PLoS One. 2020 Feb 27;15(2):e0229507.
- Kassiano, W., Costa, B., Kunevaliki, G., Soares, D., Zacarias, G., Manske, I., Takaki, Y., Ruggiero, M. F., Stavinski, N., Francsuel, J., Tricoli, I., Carneiro, M. A. S., & Cyrino, E. S. (2023). Greater Gastrocnemius Muscle Hypertrophy After Partial Range of Motion Training Performed at Long Muscle Lengths. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 37(9), 1746–1753.
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