 Question is from Minifig. When you hit a plateau with your deadlift, what exercises or techniques can you implement to help you overcome the plateau and increase the weight you're able to lift? So specific to the deadlift. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. This is hard when you don't know why they're plateauing. Yeah, we don't know why, so I'm gonna give you some general answers that I think apply to a lot of people, okay? One of the, one thing that I did that made a big difference with my deadlift was when I started using bands on my deadlift. When I was able to get a platform, and you can do this without a platform too, it's just way more convenient and easier to do with a platform. I would have bands on either side of the bar, so I'd load the bar with weight, have the bands, and then as I deadlift the bands, as you stretch bands out, they get tighter and tighter. So what ends up happening is at the bottom of the deadlift, it's pretty much whatever the weight is on the bar, plus a little bit of extra resistance, but as I'm pulling it up, it gets harder and harder because the bands stretch out. So it's giving me this kind of variable resistance, and that alone added about 15 pounds to my deadlift. Once I incorporated those, I noticed, and they just feel really good when you get up to the top and it's the heaviest at the top of the rep. So that's one thing that I did that really made a big difference. Another thing I did was deficit deadlifts. This one was really good. There's an easy way to do this, by the way. Some people like to stand on like 45 pound plates. Yeah, here's another easier way to do it. Use 35 pound plates. It's another bar shorter. So now you have to get down lower to do your deadlift and then do your deadlift, or use 25 pound plates. And start easy and go slow. This is a great way to hurt your back if you're not good at these. Or you can stand on a block or something like that, but those really, really low deadlifts, we have to squat down real low and come up. Those also transfer to my deadlift strength and my deadlift weight. I mean, without seeing or knowing too much about this person, the first area that I would always go is I would look at programming. Like, and assume that if you're like most people when they hit hard plateaus, it's a lot of times because their programming has been pretty similar. They've been following the same programming, whether that be the same types of exercises all the time, or, and if you're trying to work on your squat or your deadlift, I mean, you're probably just deadlifting all the time. Some of the best things that you can do is, you know, if you go convention all the time, go to sumo. If you're always strength training for, you know, three to five reps and chasing PRs, you know, try training eight to 12 reps and lightening the load up. And then to Sal's point, messing with the strength curve by adding bands or chains are all great techniques or what Justin said, go to trap bar for a little bit. So I mean, I always look first to programming when someone tells me they're at a hard plateau. And then another possibility, I know personally from chasing PRs or trying to increase strength, I was overtraining. So I would also assess that part of programming. Am I deadlifting so much that I'm not allowing my body to fully recover and then come back to it? So you may need to back off volume and maybe work more technique instead of going loading so heavy all the time. So it's really tough for these types of questions when we get like a very specific, what should I do? Because it could be a very simple answer. I mean, if I looked at your programming and saw something like that where there's a big hole where it's like, oh yeah, well, the last six months, I've been training five by five, consistently always training that way. Well, shit, let's jump to the eight to 10 rep range and or let's do tempo and slow down the tempo in this section. Oftentimes when people hit a plateau with a lift, I assume, if someone says to me, I hit a plateau, okay, it means you've been focusing on this lift. This is an important lift for you. You've been trying to get stronger at it. That means you've probably pushed, pushed, pushed and you might need to back off a little bit. And oftentimes that tends to be the key where if you're always in the gym and you're always hitting 200 pounds on your deadlift or 300 pounds on your deadlift and you're pushing it, maybe cut the weight in half for a few weeks and just focus on speed and technique or perfect form and do that for a little while and then you'll find that your strength comes up. Here's another one with deadlifts that I noticed, both of myself and with clients. If your squat goes up, your deadlift tends to also go up. The alternate isn't always true. If my deadlift goes up, my squat doesn't always go up. So sometimes what I would do is I would back off on my deadlifts. I'd stop deadlifting as often or stop deadlifting as hard, focus just on my technique and my form so I'm going lighter and then push my squat a little bit and see how strong I can get in my squat. Then as my squat went up and I started feeling stronger, then I'd go back to deadlifting a little harder and I'd notice, oh, there's that boost in strength, you know, that happened. I know you mentioned the trap bar. Yeah, I mentioned the trap bar mainly too for changing up the grip and one of the things too, for me, that was always like, I would hit like a certain amount to where I could get that pretty easily or not was my grip was the factor. Your petite hands. Yeah, my nice little like dainty hands. That's not true at all. No, this is pretty rough, dude. Look at that. I know. But anyway, so I would actually use, again, the farmer walks were great for me to just focus on sustaining, like getting more grip endurance and being able to grind through and maintain that grip. I know that you switched up your grip, Sal, with the hook grip and I was wondering at what point do you want to factor that in in terms of like, okay, I can hit, I can hit this weight and there's basically a ceiling to this to where I can grab, you know, with a conventional grip, you know, prone versus like now, maybe I'll try, you know, a different technique completely start all over. Yeah, no, I had to because I had deadlifted for so long with the alternate grip and it was like my heavy sets were all right hand, you know, facing up left hand facing down and I had actually developed an imbalance in my back. People say it doesn't matter. No, it matters, you develop an imbalance. And so then I said, okay, I'm gonna go to, just both overhand and I'm gonna work on a hook grip. You know what I noticed? When I went to a hook grip of both sides, you know what got really freaking sore on me? I think it was my brachialis muscle underneath my bicep because it was pronated and I'm like handling so much weight. So it took me a year to work up to my normal weight with a hook grip. Now to this day, my hook grip is, it's not quite where my alternate grip is. My alternate grip, I could still do probably 10 to 15 pound more than my hook grip, but it's damn close and I get better, more balanced development. I would recommend everybody practice working on hook grip or if they use an alternate grip to alternate, to really alternate. Don't do what I did where I alternated but then when I went heavy it was always the same side. Yeah, I would try and go overhand as far as I could go. And then that's when I would switch to, yeah. But I like to trap borrow a lot. I dead lifted 600 pounds on a trap bar about four months before I did it on a straight bar. And that's because I plateaued and I switched the trap bar exclusively and got my weight all the way up to 615 I think it was on a trap bar. Then I went back to the straight bar and I'd noticed I just felt stronger, more solid and I was able to get it up to 600 pounds. So try all of those things one at a time on your routine and see if it kind of helps you out. If I have to take a guess, I'd say you're probably in store for some backing off though. If I had to take a guess, just from the way the question was worded.