 Anything you do, move, touch, whatever. If you lift it in the real world, it's probably gonna be connected to you through your hands. You need to have strong hands. And if you've ever moved out of your apartment or your house, I'm just gonna say that. You know exactly what I'm talking about. An hour later, it's typically your hands that are getting up. Everything's like riding on one finger that's like holding everything left. Don't be that guy who has to set his dresser down every 10 steps. Hey, do you wanna be featured on Mind Pump? You wanna be guest on our show? Go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash M-F-P dash testimonial. Leave us your testimonial. If we like your story, if it touches our hearts and blows our minds, you may win a chance to get a trip to come here to Mind Pump Studios and be on our podcast. Now in this episode, we talk about the deadlift. One of the most effective exercises anybody can do for their posterior chain. That refers to all the muscles on the backside of your body. That includes the very popular butt muscles. You wanna develop amazing glutes? You should probably deadlift. Hamstrings, yes, you should probably deadlift. What about a nice back? You got it, deadlift. What about functional strength developing a bulletproof back so you don't hurt yourself? All deadlifts. So in this episode, we talk about the deadlift, why everybody should do it. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Paleo Valley. Paleo Valley makes some pretty damn good supplements. All of them natural, all of them organic. Now my favorite product from Paleo Valley are their meat sticks. They're grass-fed meat sticks. They're not dry, they taste amazing. Even my kids like them. The macros are great, so it's no carbs. It's got some healthy fats and some proteins and they're very, very delicious. They also have pumpkin spice paleo bars. These are paleo-approved bars that you can eat at home that taste pretty damn good. Because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. Here's what you do. Go to paleovali.com, that's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code Mind Pump 15 for 15% off. One last thing, we're still running our holiday at home bundle sale, which includes three maps, workout programs that require minimal equipment so you can do all of them at home. This bundle includes maps anywhere, map suspension, and our very high-intensity, short, fat-burning workout program, maps hit. Get all three of them for $99.99. Just go to mapsnovember.com. Again, that's mapsnovember.com. Why should you deadlift? Oh, you know, to me it's funny how there's controversy. South favorite lift. Yeah, it is. It's funny to me how there's controversy around some exercises that, in my opinion, just my experience, and I'm sure you guys will agree, that are, you know, like the deadlift, for example, it's gotta be, it is one of the best all-around exercises that people should do from people who just want to improve their health, longevity, to people who wanna build a lot of muscle, to wanting to burn body fat. To me, it's crazy why there's so much, sometimes controversy around this exercise. Well, I think some of that has to do with the fear of hurting the low back. Like when you look at an exercise, and if you don't know what, you know, if you don't know what it is, right, you're looking at a deadlift. I remember in my early teens of lifting, and even in my early 20s, seeing people deadlift, although it was rare, but when you did see it, I thought, oh my God, that guy's gonna hurt his back. Like he doesn't know what he's doing. So if you're unaware of the exercise, and you've never performed the movement, or had someone teach you or tell you about the movement, at first glance, it looks like, that looks like a terrible exercise. It looks like you're just gonna hurt your low back. Yeah, especially if you see somebody performing it with bad form, and you're kind of aware of body mechanics, and you can see how that could be problematic, but, you know, not considering the benefits of that is a tragedy. Hey, you know what? Speaking of which, there was a meme the other day that was hilarious, and it said, like fitness hack, perform any exercise wrong to make it a low back exercise. That's perfect. Yes, it is. No, I think you guys are right because for so long we've been hammered that we need to lift things a particular way off the ground, right? You gotta squat real low and don't bend over to pick things. In other words, don't hip hinge because that could hurt your back, and that's totally false. If with proper form, a deadlift, just like any exercise, by the way, if you can perform the exercise with good strength and mobility and technique, that exercise is safe. Now, there's definitely higher risks with some exercises, but mainly because there's more skill involved with some exercises. For example, the risk of doing a dumbbell curl is far lower than doing a squat or a deadlift, and especially lower than doing, let's say, an Olympic lift like a snatch. Mainly because those are very high-skill or high-skill in comparison exercises, but done properly, deadlifts are incredibly safe, so yes, that's part of the reasons why. And you know what? It is better these days than it used to be. I mean, when I was a trainer in the late 90s, when I first became a trainer, and up until the early 2000s, now I had the luxury of learning how to work out from some power lifters early on. I was maybe 16 years old, I think, and they were the ones that taught me about barbell squats. They taught me about the deadlift, and it completely blew my mind because as a kid, trying to build muscle, it was so hard to gain even a half a pound of muscle. I did those two exercises, and over a summer, I think I gained 15 pounds, and it was just, it blew me away of how much muscle I could gain from just these two exercises. So here I was as a trainer, 18, 19, 20 years old in the late 90s in these gyms that had, I mean, we're talking about 30,000 square foot gyms, so big gyms, big box gyms, lots of equipment, lots of cardio, lots of machines, one squat rack, and nobody deadlift. In fact, when I was, as a trainer with deadlift, I would get stopped by members predictably, would come up to me and tell me, hey kid, you're gonna hurt your back, you shouldn't be doing that, or you call yourself a trainer, that's not a good exercise. Dude, even in the athletic world, I think that it just was shunned for, which was hilarious to me because we were doing power cleans that we would pick the weight off the ground, which in a sense is, yeah, but even before that, going through the technique of it, you have to pick it up with good tension and be controlled and stable, and it's everything that you wanna apply in a normal deadlift, it's just that adding a bit more weight and just focusing on that part of the lift for some reason, we weren't focusing on that, but if we would have, it would have definitely contributed to a better lift for our Olympic lifts. Lifting things off the ground is a fundamental human movement. Till this day, it's probably one of the only times you lift something. If you think, we have a very sedentary life nowadays, right? We live in modern societies. We sit at desks all day and chairs all day or in our cars all day, but think about the one time you actually are working with resistance in the real world. You're probably rarely picking things up and pressing about overhead, sometimes maybe. You rarely squat with a full squat these days, although that's a fundamental human movement, just we don't do it a lot, right? But you probably still bend over to pick up a box. Maybe your Amazon package came in or your DoorDash food came in or your PRX stuff, which is a bit heavy. Yeah. Or you're gonna pick up your kid or your dog or a bag of dog food. It's a fundamental human movement that is still very important and relevant today with the movements that we're still doing today. So it's something that you should make stronger. I think the main reason is it's the most difficult exercise for somebody to learn that is part of the core five lifts that we talk about all the time. I think it's more difficult than a squat. A squat is something relatively close to what everybody does. If you sit down in a chair, you have done some form of a squat whether it was pretty or not. There's definitely more fear in getting people dead left. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the whole idea of being able to keep your back rigid, your arms stiff and then to hinge at the hips and keep everything in this fixed position while you just hinge. There's just, there's not a lot of things that you do every single day where you do that properly. Like even the things that you're talking about, right? Like bending over to grab your Amazon package. The truth is nobody is hinging at the hips to do that. True. They're rounding at the back and they're doing that. And because it's so lightweight, most people don't get injured and the few people that do, it's because they went just a little bit out of range of motion and up hurting themselves. So when I look at the deadlift and I think about like the people that I trained and why they didn't do it before I trained them, most of them just fear. The fear of doing it incorrectly and hurting their back. And it is technical. It's a little more difficult to teach, I think, than even a squat. Like I said, I can get somebody to squat relatively good like right away in the first session. Sometimes deadlifting can take repeat sessions with me of coaching before I can really get them to get the movement down. And you know, it's funny. I'd say the last 10 years of my personal training career, I did train a lot of people over the age of 60. I had, I'd say at least 40% or 50% of my class, which is a big percentage. Most trainers don't have that many clients over that age group, but I did. I worked, my studio was next to a hospital. I had lots of referrals from doctors. And I had all of them deadlift. Every 70 year olds, 80 year old. I mean, of course it was all appropriate. So sometimes the deadlift consisted of a resistance band. Sometimes it was just a bar. But I had some of them, you know, at 70 deadlifting the 45 pound plates, you know, or I would get the big quarter plates that were the same diameter. So they could have it off the same distance off the floor. Never once did I have a back injury with any of my clients. Doug, who was my client. In fact, Doug hired me because he had back problems. And within six months he was able to deadlift close to 400 pounds with no back pain whatsoever. So it's this whole, it's a myth, this whole thing about you deadlift wrong, yes, you'll hurt yourself. Just like if you do anything wrong with weight. Right, and I've seen people sort of steer people more towards a trap bar or something that's maybe a little easier to teach, but also, you know, there's problems that could occur even with that in front where I know Mark Ripto kind of talks about this where like there's a potential for it to swing. And, you know, but as far as just like stepping into it in the grips, you know, it's a little bit easier to coach. So I could see like starting there as sort of a starting point, but really what we're trying to do is address the posterior chain, which is very hard to do unless you're doing something like a deadlift. Well, you know, and I don't know how much I agree or disagree with Mark with his assessment of that. I think the trap bar deadlift is too much like a squat to call it a deadlift to me. I think it emulates a squat. Especially for someone that does not a hip hinge well. Right. They end up turning it into a very deadlift. A squat. It'd be like, yeah, like 60, 70% more squat than deadlift. So, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of, I mean, it's a great regression for like somebody at an advanced age that's really, really stiff and tight and not good mobility at all. But if you have relatively good mobility and I can get you down in that position, I'd prefer to teach you on a barbell. There's another, you know, community or group of people that avoid it. And this one is probably the most annoying for me because it's not from fear of them getting hurt but of fear of building a bulky waist. So, and that's the bodybuilding community. The whole, the fitness, the figure, competitor, the big, you know, physique. When I was deadlifting the most was actually when I was competing. It just happened to overlap with, you know, me meeting Sal and Sal was really good at deadlifting and I'm competitive by nature and it was fun to try and see if I could catch up to the amount of weight he was doing and up until that point in my life, I had never programmed like, can I get really strong in deadlifts? And, you know, I tried to do that. And so I was in the middle of competing and deadlifting more weight than I'd ever deadlifted and more frequently than I ever had in my entire career. And never was that a problem for my waist on stage. In fact, that was one of my strengths was my shoulder to waist ratio. But yet it's still very, very popular in the bodybuilding space. I would see all my peers and many of them didn't, most of them didn't deadlift. It would, in fact, it was really rare that I would meet another men's physique athlete that was also deadlifting, which is a shame. Yeah, the irony is some of the best competitive bodybuilders of all time. Were great deadlifters. Had, were deadlifts, were a staple in the routine or it was a staple early in the routine, okay? So Dorian Yates, he deadlifted a lot early in his career. Later on, didn't deadlift so much. Ronnie Coleman, obviously that famous video on YouTube of him, you know, pulling 800 pounds off the floor was a powerlifter, Franco Colombo, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Deadlifts develop incredible muscle. They're very effective in the whole waistbuilding thing. Look, here's the deal at the most. If you just, if you just have this weird, amazing muscle building genetics of your waist, you're gonna maybe add a less than a quarter of an inch around your waist of muscle, which is pales in comparison to the inches of fat that you may carry around your waist. Yeah, but if you get lean enough, I mean, it's defined, it looks great. Well, it doesn't happen. And not only that, it tends to, like this was like what we talked about with the whole CrossFit thing. Someone asked us a question not that long ago on our show about, you know, why does it seem like so many CrossFit girls have boxy waist and it's not the exercises that have caused that. It's that- Self-selection bias. Yeah, when you have a, if you have a wider waist, it's gonna be easier to lift heavier weight on there. It's more advantageous to have- Well, you know what the irony is, a deadlifter body doesn't necessarily have to have a wide waist. You look at someone like Larry Wills, who's got actually quite a small waist compared to- Yeah, or myself. Or you, it's long arms. Long arms is really the biomechanical advantage. Totally. So you, that good deadlifters tend to have long arms and tend to be kind of tall. But aside from that, no, you're not, don't worry about building your waist, it's stupid. And here's the thing with bodybuilders. Stop looking at pro bodybuilders for what you need to do. They're very different from you. And they tend to shy away from more complex, challenging exercises in favor of easier ones to develop their muscles. And it makes sense, I get it, why they may do something like that. That's why bodybuilders don't do, a lot of them do barbell squats either. And the average person would be done to not do a barbell squat. Here's the other category of people. It's better now, but it used to really annoy me. Cause this group of people should know better. And that's trainers. I see trainers who are afraid to teach clients, had a deadlift. And part of it may be because they believe in the myth of deadlifting that it's too risky. But I think a big part of it is they're lazy. They're not confident enough to teach it a lot of times too, I noticed. Okay, so if I'm being honest, that's what it was for me. I didn't train it very often as a young trainer, which made me feel insecure about teaching it. And I'm still this way today. You're not gonna catch me teaching a client how to snatch, cause I don't think that I'm proficient enough in it. So if I don't believe I'm proficient enough in a movement, I don't believe in teaching that movement. I think that you should at least have acquired that skill yourself. And so when you look at your 24 hour fitness, your USC gyms, your crunches, your typical big box gym trainer, I would venture to say that what, 60%, maybe, and I would say on a good side of 60, when we were trainers, 80 to 90% did not deadlift. I mean, on all of my training staffs, maybe I had one or two trainers that deadlifted. Yeah, maybe I had that. So if you figure you got a great, a huge percentage of trainers in these big box gyms that are seeing a majority of our general population, they're not deadlifting themselves. They're not gonna feel secure enough to teach it to the general pop. And that's why we're seeing this. Yeah, in fact, in those days, you still see this a lot in gyms these days, but a lot of the plates are these hexagonal plates, which you can't deadlift with. Yeah, terrible. Yeah, you place them down. Especially if it's touching go. Exactly, they shift and then you gotta fix the bar and all that stuff. And although a lot of gyms now are starting to change back to the round ones, which are what you would appropriately wanna deadlift with. Here's the funny thing. These days I see women deadlifting more than I do men in terms of not in terms of total weight, but in terms of just numbers. Well, word got out that it does great things for your posterior. That's right. The deadlift develops, essentially think of it this way. It'll work your backside from your neck all the way down to essentially your knees, even your calves a little bit, really but down to your knees. So with good deadlifting, you'll develop hamstrings, really good hamstrings, really good glutes, amazing erector spinae muscles. These are the muscles in the middle of your back that go all the way up. You'll get great lat activation, rhomboid and trapezius activation. In fact, all those muscles I just listed, the deadlift just happens to be either the best exercise for all those muscles or top three best exercise for all those muscles. I can't think of another exercise that can do that. Really, I mean, we just said hamstrings, glutes, all those back muscles. And I'm not even counting things like your grip and forearm strength. The deadlift is the best exercise or at least top three for all of them. And there's camps right now that will make an argument of specific exercises that target those areas and therefore they think is better. For example, doing a lying leg curl is going to target the hamstrings more directly, right? Arguably than a deadlift, but it will not build your hamstrings more than a deadlift. Not even close. Yeah, not even close. And a lot of that has to do with the load. You just cannot load the lying leg curl the same way you can load a heavy deadlift. Well, I remember you telling the story of when you used the hamstring curl all the time and you stopped so that you could just deadlift and then you went back to the hamstring curl and you were... Strongest I've ever been in my life. Yeah. I mean, literally over 10 years of consistent lying leg curls consistently for 10 years and then taking a break for almost a year and only deadlifting, because that was, again, back when I was trying to chase your numbers. And so I was deadlifting, you know, on a low week, two times a week on a high week, four times a week. And of course, varying my load and everything in intensity. But I was, that's how frequent I was deadlifting. Cause, and I was like, so I don't need to be doing any hamstring curls. And it wasn't until I had got my deadlift well over 500 pounds that I thought, oh, let me see what I can leg curl. I hadn't done any of these exercises and really got on the machine thinking that, okay, I haven't done it in a year. I can't expect to be as strong as I was, you know, last year when I was doing this at my peak and low and behold, you know, I was like double the weight. And it was just, it blew my mind. Yeah, the body responds to the environment that you present it in. And the thing is, like, it's such a louder signal and it's such a louder, you know, response that the body has to account for. And so it's gonna try and adapt to this environment that you're placing in. So thinking of that versus like a single joint exercise versus a multi joint exercise, you know, this overall demand is just gonna create a bigger response and a louder response. Oh, and so just for me, like again, when I first introduced these into my workouts, I remember just being blown away how this one exercise could get my body to respond more than all these other exercises I had done before. And then when I would train clients, clients, of course, there would be a little bit of pushback, especially my older clients. Ooh, I don't know if I should be doing that, but they trusted me and luckily I'm convincing and I convinced them to do it. And within a month or two, they'd come back to me and be like, I feel I'm standing taller. I've never felt so strong. Salina, back pain that used to bother me a little bit. I don't have it anymore. It doesn't bother me or I'd get my female clients where they'd come to me and be like, my husband's commenting on my backside or I can't believe how good I look. I had one woman who was getting married and she was gonna wear a dress where the back was exposed. And she was afraid of deadlifting because of all the stuff we talked about earlier. I said, don't worry about it. Anyway, she took a picture when she tried the dress on and then there was a picture from her actual wedding and there was a period of months in between them. And the before and after and there was incredible. Her low back, the low back where you see the curvature and where you get that nice space in between looks really attractive on women. That was the part that she was most blown away with. And this is over the course of months. Like I think it was like three months. It wasn't years or anything like that. So just an incredibly effective exercise. And then the crossover into the real world is just amazing. You get strong hands. You get a strong spine. You know, if you were to take your spine out of your body, it's made up of all these joints. A spine, you try to stand it up on the table or on the floor and it flops over in whatever direction. What supports it and keeps it rigid and prevents it from getting injured or all the muscles that surround it, all the muscles that are around it. And a big part of that are all the muscles of the back. And doing deadlifts will make, if you do them right and you get strong, let me put it this way. If you have good form, good technique and you're pretty strong at a deadlift, you, your back is close to bulletproof. You're not gonna hurt your back, you know, lifting something off the floor at home. You're not gonna hurt your back by picking up a box or playing with your kids. Your back becomes close to bulletproof. Here's the other thing that, you know, besides what most people think, this is really best for beginners. Oh, it's a great exercise for beginners. You know, for beginners, when I think of like how I used to train clients, right? So I avoided exercise like this because they were difficult. Later in my career, things like the squat and the deadlift began to become the center point of all of my programming. Like if I got a beginner client and it doesn't matter what their goal was to, you know, lose body, fat, build muscle, longevity, overall health, whatever, but they are a new client and they couldn't deadlift or squat very well. That was like everything. It was all about getting a good deadlift because I knew once I did that, it laid such a solid foundation for everything else that we were going to do. Not to mention all the benefits that come from doing this exercise. So it's not just getting good at the deadlift lays this great foundation, but the amount of calories it burns, the amount of muscle that it builds. And then when you were talking about the deadlift that's working the posterior chain, when you looked at common deviations on clients, we're so anterior driven, meaning all the, we work all the muscles in front of us. We're so, we're rounded forward and we're closing in, right? From sitting at desk and doing things in front of us. And the deadlift literally opposes all of that. It's one of the best exercise to bring you back into good posture. Yes. For all those things you mentioned, like we're always doing things in front of us and we're just not addressing our muscles behind us because it's just not a consideration that we have very often to really single that out. And like you, I started to rearrange the way I would deal with beginners because I looked at it, I mean, this is the base. This is the base of the tree. This is a trunk of the tree. I have to start here in order to establish a good fundamental strength to then tear off from that and then introduce all these other variables to them. Now, when you're a beginner in your deadlifting, just like with any other exercise, the goal is not to see how strong you can get. The goal is not to push yourself to your limit. The goal is to perfect the technique in the form. So treat the deadlift as a practice, right? So if you've never done it before or if you haven't done it in a while, when you go to the gym and it's time to deadlift, think of every set like practice, like you're practicing your free throw or you're practicing your golf swing. You're not trying to do it as hard as you can. You're just doing it over and over again with excellent technique, excellent form. Here's another thing for beginners that I often need to communicate. You want shoes that are very flat, okay? Any kind of a heel in your shoe, like a running shoe. Running shoes tend to have a little bit of a heel. Most sneakers have a little bit of a heel. You don't want that because that throws your center of gravity forward a little bit. You want very flat shoes. So chucks are really good from converse. Or barefoot. Or barefoot. Minimus kind of shoes. If you're working at home, you could go barefoot. You want to have really, really flat feet. And when you bend down and bend over to grab the bar, first off, make sure you can go all the way down to the bar with good form. If you can't, this is when it's okay to put it on a rack and practice from higher heights. And this is what I would do with a lot of my clients. I would have them go down as low as they could with really good technique. And if that wasn't enough to get a bar, that was the whatever what they call the regulatory height off the ground, which is the size of your 45 pound plates. That's how far all deadlifts start, right? If they can't go down like that without bad form, they're too tight or whatever, then I would put it up on a rack. So we would start with the bar just above their knees or just below their knees. As they got better at that, then we would slowly lower the bar. Once we got down to the proper height, then I would go practice with the bar and add a little bit of weight at a time. The idea is to get really good with the technique. You also want to hinge at the hips, bend the knees. And when you come up, you don't want your hips, you don't want your knees to straighten before you come up with your hips. Okay, this is an issue that sometimes beginners make where they'll come up with the deadlift and what'll happen is they'll straighten their knees and now the rest of the deadlift looks like, straight legs, like a straight leg deadlift, which is not what we're trying to do here. They're both simultaneous, knees and hips at the same time. And then you stand up real tall with your shoulders back. Because otherwise you end up with this folded over upper body position that now I'm trying to hinge just my upper body up to make up for that last bit. It all has to happen. Yes, brace your core while you're doing this. And don't exaggerate, here's another mistake a lot of beginners make. They exaggerate the arch in their low back. They think that because they're bending over and hinging that they need to arch super strong, that will make you not feel too good in your low back. You want to have your normal neutral spine posture, brace it, keep it that way the entire time. And we've done some really good videos. I did a good sumo deadlifting video. I know collectively we've all done a deadlift video on there. We did some great content with Jordan Syat on there that was for deadlifting with tons of it. I think we have several videos with Jordan Shallow as far as deadlifting. So of course all of our programs have deadlift built into it. But then if you're looking to perfect the movement or learn the movement and get good at the technique of it, absolutely use the Mind Pump TV as a resource. Now here's the fun part, right? Once you get to the point where your technique is really good and you're slowly adding weight and you can start to challenge yourself, the strength gains that come from the deadlift are fast and furious. They are really, really fun. It's enjoyable pace yourself because sometimes you can push it a little bit too fast. But this is when you have a lot of fun. The deadlift is one of those exercises that is really, really good in the relatively low rep range. It's one of those exercises where anywhere between five to eight reps is great for most people. And you can have a lot of fun adding weight little by little. I know with my beginning clients, once we got past the point of technique and mobility and everything's looking good, I mean it was not uncommon to add five to 10 pounds every single week, which is exciting. I don't know too many other exercises where you see those kind of strength gains come on that quick. You guys think that some of the benefits that you get from deadlifting similar to squat is this way too. And I'm trying to think of another exercise where this comes to mind, but they both have an isometric component in it the entire time. Like when you think about that exercise, like in order for you to deadlift, especially if you start lifting 100, 200, 300 plus pounds, the importance of being able to keep a rigid stable spine. It just forces an isometric contraction on all of those back muscles, your core muscles to hold that position. And then on top of that, you're also hip hinging, right? So the combination of that posterior chain and the hamstrings, the glutes having to fire, but then also the isometric contraction that you're getting all up and down your spine, I would think that has to be one of the major reasons why it's so beneficial and so many people neglect isometric exercise in the first place. It is, and if you can lift good weight and maintain stable spine, you create a pattern, a movement pattern in your body where you're safe, you keep your back safe from injury in the everyday world. I mean, that's the recipe to promote strength is to create a situation where you can stabilize a substantial amount of load and now you can generate more force to accommodate for that. So it's really the body just needs to know that all the joints are safe and stable and accounted for in order to provide you with more of this force output. So the body just doesn't wanna do that to injure you. So you're creating this environment now that shows that there's a way to channel this and harness that force that you have already. Do you guys notice how, and I think I really noticed this more recent than I did earlier on because of the emphasis on how much deadlifting I did later on in my career. This just happened to me just the other day. I was, we were coming back from somewhere. I don't remember where Katrina and I just went not that long ago, it was a couple of weeks ago. And God, she loaded her suitcase up with, I mean, the fucking thing had had been a hundred something pounds. Like it was so. What? Yeah, that much. She must be paying a big bill to your wife. No, we weren't flying, we're driving. There's no guarantee it was well over the 52 pound limit. She packed her dumbbells? Yeah, that reminds me of Spaceballs, when she picks up that like huge hair dryer. So it felt like that, right? So the reason why I'm sharing this is because I catch myself doing this naturally because I've trained the deadlift so often is we have four flights of stairs right in my house. And so I go to get up the stairs and right away, of course, I'm like anybody else. I default to my bad pattern. I just kind of step on the step. And right away, I can feel like I'm not in a good position. And I naturally just kind of hinge the hips back and then load the glutes. And it's just because I've practiced that hip hinge so much in the deadlift, it's almost subconsciously as soon as my body feels, whoa, this is a lot. This is more weight than, you know, if I'm carrying something light up and downstairs, you don't even think about it. But at the moment, I have to like, okay, focus a little bit on stabilizing and being in control and I could hurt myself. My body naturally then kicked back into the and loaded my hips. And it's from all that practice of hinging at the hips with the deadlift. And I can feel myself walking up the stairs. I don't feel it in my low back. I feel it in my butt. My butt feels it as I'm walking up versus how most people would just kind of be holding onto the bags with their back all rounded as they go up and then we'd feel it in their low back. It became your pattern. This is what, these are what these default patterns, that's how you develop these default patterns as you train them over time. And if your default pattern is to be stable with a deadlift with 200 pounds or whatever, lifting a suitcase or a box off the floor, a default pattern or something you don't even have to think about. So automatically, and I'm sure you realized it after. It's all you thought to yourself. Yeah, it wasn't like I stopped and thought about it. I took the first step right away, didn't feel stable and then, boop, my body kicked it back into my hips. It loaded my glutes. Exactly. And then I walked up the rest of the stairs. Exactly. Here's another thing a lot of people are, this is funny that people aren't talking about this because this isn't in all the current literature, but one of the body parts that they're noticing the greatest weaknesses right now is in our hands. In fact, there was a study done recently. I was like a couple of years ago at college campuses where they were testing young men's grip strength and then they compared it to a test that was done in the early 80s. So essentially these young men's grip strength compared to the strength of their dad's hands back when they were the same age. And it was, it was embarrassing. It was like 30, 50% weaker. They compared these young men's strength to the seven year old man's strength back in the early 80s. Carpal tunnel syndrome is quite common now. You're starting to see a lot of wrist injuries. Our hands are getting very, very weak. And we are, I mean, we are primates and our hands should be one of the stronger parts of our body. Deadlifts really do a good job of giving you stronger hands. Now here's the thing, here's why you think to yourself, why do I need strong hands for? Your hands still today connect you to the rest of your world. Anything you do, move, touch, whatever, if you lift it in the real world, it's probably gonna be connected to you through your hands. You need to have strong hands. And if you've ever moved out of your apartment or your house, you know exactly what I'm talking about. An hour later, it's typically your hands that are getting up. Everything's like riding on one finger that's like holding everything left. Don't be that guy who has to set his dresser down every 10 steps. Yeah, you never wanna be that guy, right? I tried doing that with my dad. Or the other guy who doesn't wanna put it down but his grip is going, right? And then you drop the shit. No, I do with my dad. The difference between me and my dad is I have strong hands, but they're not tough. Like his hands, he's got that thick skin, you know? So I'm like, how does this not like tear it? It doesn't even feel it. As far as strength is concerned or carryover for sports, it's excellent. It gives you that strong posterior chain. For some sports, in my opinion, deadlifts are essential. I mean, if you're a grappler, you gotta have a good, if you wanna lift people off the ground and launch them, you need to have a good deadlift. And I remember doing jiu-jitsu and judo and when my deadlift strength was good, I felt, if I gotta hold somebody, even if my technique wasn't 100%, they were gonna get frequent flyer miles because I felt so strong in that position. Well, I feel too that you're more grounded. And I know like every sport varies in terms of like what skills are probably best for, but this being like a fundamental thing to be able to organize your body to all of a sudden brace and be able to like control the ground where you are on the field or on the court or wherever it is. I mean, that's a crucial element in sports. Well, no, you're bringing a good point with like being grounded because actually a lot of other exercises in sports is on the balls of your feet. Yes. So much of the emphasis is put on that, a majority of the time. And so making sure that you're training where you are completely grounded and driving into the heels plays a big role in working the opposite side. It does. And again, it just gives you that overall body strength. And I'll say this, like you talk to any trainer who's worth their salt, you talk to any athletic coach and they'll tell you that some of the most important muscles on athletes are revolve around the hips, the lumbopalvic hip area, right? The glutes, the hamstrings, and then the back. Like if those are well-developed and strong, you're gonna be a better athlete. You're gonna be tougher. You see this in football players quite often. You see this in wrestlers. You see this in many, many baseball players even, their ability to sprint and take off and stabilize. It's glutes, low back, upper back. Those are all very, very important. More important than some of the other muscles on the body that we tend to glorify. And the deadlift works all of them. So it's one of the best exercises for overall strength. As far as muscle development is concerned, holy Toledo. I mean, if you wanna look good from the back, I cannot, there's no single exercise that can compete to the deadlift. I would literally have to put together five, probably four or five exercises in order to equal the bang for its dollar to the deadlift, right? Like how many exercises that work? All the muscles of the back, the glutes and the hamstrings as effectively as the deadlift. You have to do like three or four exercises to do that. Not only do I agree with this, this is also an opportunity to address stuff that I see floating around on social media these days, which drives me crazy. There is this camp that likes to point out when people talk about deadlifting for the back, that it is not a back exercise. It's a lower body exercise. It's a hip hinge exercise. It's not a great exercise for the back. And it's always said by- It's always said by people who don't deadlift. Well, it's always said by somebody who doesn't have an impressive back either. Show me somebody who has some of the most impressive backs and then ask all of them if they believe that they attribute some or if not all of that to their deadlifting. I mean, for me personally, my back went to a whole another level. Somewhere on your Instagram, you have that before and after. Yeah, it's deep when my- It's in there, but it was literally, he was a pro in both pictures. So you're talking about years of training and then the difference between one picture and the other was months. And the only difference was you had a dead- And it was so stark and different. It was crazy. No, no, it completely changed my back. It looked completely different. I built muscles in my back that it didn't look like I had them before. And it was purely just from deadlifting. And the irony is that I was just like the hamstring analogy. When I started deadlifting, when you start deadlifting as frequent as three times a week, it obviously ends up replacing a lot of other stuff. I wasn't doing a lot of rowing exercises and machine back exercises anymore. Like I didn't have time to do all that stuff because I was spending it all on improving my deadlift because that's what I was chasing. The irony was less exercises, more focus just on that, bigger, more developed back from deadlifting. Didn't you notice, I think was it your cable row that you went back to? Oh yeah, just the similar thing happened with the leg curls. Like so I talk about how I stopped leg curling. I also like completely eliminated seated row. Just seated row became a totally foreign exercise to me, which was a staple. For at least a decade of weight training, anytime I did back, seated row was like the first, seated row or pull-ups was always my first exercise that I did to start my back workout for the longest time. And then when I got into deadlifting consistently that completely went out the door. I was just like, okay, I'm not gonna seated row. I'm gonna get into priming for my back and getting my hips all ready to go heavy deadlift. And deadlifting became like a 20 minute to 30 minute section of my lifting. It was all centered around that. And so I had to drop off some of these exercises that I thought were gonna be less beneficial to improving my deadlift. Cause again, at that point, the main focus was to get a better deadlift and get strong. The irony and the funny part about it was that I ended up building a better looking back by just doing deadlifts than all those other auxiliary movements that I was doing before. When you went back to the row, you were stronger. Oh yeah. And then I went back to the row and I had added like well over 50 pounds to the seated row while not doing it. That's so crazy. Yeah, that's insane because that's so opposite of what you would think. And a lot of these guys and girls that are on there saying, oh, this doesn't work the back. They tend to be these biomechanic experts. And yes, biomechanically speaking, the deadlift is a lumbel pelvic hip exercise. It is a hip exercise. But the tension you place on your back and especially because it's connecting to your arms and the bracing that is required. And there is some range of motion happening. When you're bent over in a deadlift and you come up to straight, you get lat activation, you get rhomboid and trap activation. You just- Just being retracted too. I mean, you're contracting your back. And just, okay, up until this point, okay? Years, decade over decade of weight training and getting strong at pull-ups, strong at row, strong at bent over row. I got really strong on all that. In fact, I think, so up into that point, my lower back and mid-back had never felt more than about 225. So I think at one point I was really strong rowing about 225, bent over row 225 and probably seated row with the cables like 175 or 150. So until deadlifting became a staple in my life, my back had never felt 300, 400, 550 pounds before. So no shit, it got strong and it grew because all those other exercises, I could never progress to that kind of weight where deadlifting allowed me to progress to that much load, that much load just isometrically holding with the back, you're gonna build a back. Now, one thing I wanna add, you said deadlifting three days a week or two days a week or even four days a week. Here's the thing, and this is true for any exercise, but especially a complex gross motor movement like the deadlift, make sure you modify your intensity if you do that. And that's actually how I recommend, if you really wanna get good at the deadlift, frequency is very important. I think two days a week of deadlifting for most people is great for people who are more advanced, you could do three days a week, but that doesn't mean you're going hard two or three days a week. I think hard once a week. So if I'm in a deadlift hard, it's once a week. The second day or the third day, it's technique. You start tapering off a little bit. Yes, it's form, I'm going much lighter, I'm focusing on the feel of the lift, on my technique. One day a week is heavy. I don't think it's, for most people, you go too hard with two or three days a week of deadlifting, just like any exercise. I actually would never even go heavy. If I was doing three and four, this was like, this is all technique. It was never heavy and hard. And what I would do though, let's say I did two or three weeks in a row of a lot of frequency, like three days a week of deadlifting, but and then now I wanted to see my strength. Then I would plan, okay, next week, I'm going to see what my max is or what I'm up to. And then I would drop down to only two times of deadlifting that week. That would be a real hard, heavy one. And then it would be like a real light one and just kind of like going form and technique or speed, something like that. Right, right. Now, if you want to get a stronger deadlift for those of you who are listening who are more advanced, one exercise that's got tremendous carryover to the deadlift is the squat. You get stronger at squatting. Your deadlifts tends to go up. Here's the second thing. One of the beauties of the deadlift, there's two things that I love about it. Number one, you don't need a spotter. The floor is right there. So it's very easy to put it down. Number two, it's an easy exercise to use progressive resistance on. And deadlifts work so well with progressive resistance. I love present correct. Yeah, I can't even say it. Progressive resistance. You get so excited. Say it really fast. Yeah, with rubber bands or chains or things like that to use on the outside, it just gives you that nice, it matches your strength curve. It's just a nice way to introduce an even higher amount of resistance against you. For progressive resistance, it goes deadlift first, then squat, and then bench press in terms of the best exercises to do those with. And this is literally how it works. You get a heavy chain, you attach it to the sides of the bar, and as you lift, each link starts to come off the floor so the weight starts to get heavier. It just gradually gets heavier. That's it. And incidentally, you're strongest at the top of the deadlift and weakest at the bottom so it matches your strength curve. Resistance bands do this as well. And when I added those is when I got my deadlift over the 600 pound mark. That's when I hit my highest deadlift of all time was when I was practicing a lot with progressive resistance. The other thing you do with bands is you can attach them at angles. So if you want to focus on the pullback or the lockout or different, you can change the angle so that the bands are maybe pulling the bar away from you to make you focus on staying back on your heels and pulling back. So deadlifts, phenomenal exercise. Every single person should do them. Get really good at them, practice them. They get strong at them to develop the best hamstrings, glutes and back that you'll get in your entire life. Get your back bulletproof. That's it. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio so you can come find us on YouTube, Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on social media. You can find us on Instagram and now also on Parler. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal, Adam at Mind Pump Adam and Doug at Mind Pump Doug. Oh yeah, that is. No, do you see that Justin did a old throwback post of him and I when- Dude, you guys were, I know. Handsome. I had to pick one where Adam was at his handsomest, you know, that way he wouldn't get all mad at me. So this is a, this is- Nobody, all the comments, nobody- This isn't Adam. Yeah. I didn't even like respond. So here's what's happened and-