 Our next caller is Will from Tennessee. Hey, what's up, Will? How can we help you? Will. Hey fellas, how are you? Good, man. I'd like to say thank you. I appreciate what you do. Your platform, your information is amazing. I actually got hooked on your podcast. You were on the Order of Man podcast, and that's where I kind of gone on to you. But anyways, just had to give a shout out to Ryan Nicler over there. My question is really my goals. I've got a five-year-old son. I want to be as strong and as agile for him as possible. I've been listening to you. I've got a three-day a week full body routine going pretty consistent. Haven't worked in any trigger sessions yet. At the moment, I'm building a deadlift platform for my home. And I guess my question to you is, is there any benefit in making it possible to do deficit deadlifts on that platform? There's some good value in deficit deadlifts, especially if your sticking point is at the bottom of a deadlift. Now, one caveat is you need to have the mobility and the technique to do it. Because if you're tight and your ankle mobility isn't that great, or you start to round your back just to be able to go down low enough to do a deficit deadlift, you're increasing your risk of injury quite a bit. There's also another way of doing these. So one way is to stand on a platform. It allows you to still use the 45, especially if you're real strong, still stack the 45s on your side. If you're not lifting more than a couple hundred pounds on a deficit deadlift, you could also just put 35s on it or 25s. And now it's just lower to the floor and you don't need to stand on anything in order to elevate yourself. But if you're using the big plates, obviously, you can't fit 15, 25s on each side, then I would use a platform. And the way that I would program it is I would do my normal workouts. And if you have the prerequisite mobility, then one workout, I would focus on deficit deads. And then maybe at the end of the workout, I would do a couple sets of traditional off-the-floor type deadlifts. To be clear, though, I mean, based off of what you kind of said real quick, and I don't know, I don't know how deep we can get into your goals. But I mean, if it's more about being a dad and being strong and being mobile, you're not missing a tremendous if you're not. I mean, you could do without a ramp. Yeah, exactly. In fact, I would love to see you doing like a maps performance type of program. I mean, it sounds like your goals are really similar to kind of where my goals are in my life right now. I really don't care about being the buffest dude right now or getting on stage or anything crazy like that. I really want to be able to keep up with my son. I want to be strong. I want to be able to get down and squat in the squatted position and play with him and not feel like my back's on fire or my knees are killing me. And so if you align with that, then actually like a maps performance type of program where you got good strength training, foundational days, three days a week, and then you're working on a lot of your mobility, I think you'll get the biggest bang from your butt. And that doesn't mean that you, I wouldn't have you also deadlift and then follow like an anabolic program. But I think Well, we put deadlifts in performance too, especially in phase one. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's in there. And I do think there's value in deficit, deadlifts, but just, you know, use it as like a completely different exercise. So this is something like you want to reduce the weight substantially until you feel like you really have control over that at the bottom part because, and two, this is going to help with those functional goals as well, because you are going to be in positions where you're bending over substantially. And, you know, it's going to help to give you like strength where you need it in compromising type positions, which is ideal. But to Adam's point, you know, in terms of like a lot of more different relatable, translatable kind of functional moves, like you're going to get that in performance, you know, a bit more. Yeah. You know, Will, I know there's a lot of like specific strength athletes, like power lifters that really, they relatively regularly program deficit, deadlifts into their, their programs. And remember, these are power lifters. And the goal is to get as strong as possible in three lifts. Now, if you're just looking for overall strength and muscle and balance, because power lifting can be sometimes oftentimes a very unbalanced sport. It's all in, you know, one plane, right? Then, you know, deficit deads, like I personally, I do deficit deadlifts, you know, maybe a few times a year. And to give you an idea of how much weight I'll use on it. If I'm doing singles with 500 or 520 pounds, I'm not going above 300 pounds on a deficit dead. So what Justin said is 100% accurate. It's, it's, you're, you're treating it like range of motion, staying connected, not necessarily like your deadlift where you're pushing the weight. Very similar to if your goal is to get more depth in your squat, right? And I think that's a, that's a valuable goal to have, because it does set you up for success when you're in those types of positions to generate force and strength, you know, in some of those more difficult positions. So I find value in deficit deadlift. I find value in, you know, really getting depth in your squat. Just make sure you're really, you know, treating them with respect and, and, and, you know, lightening the load substantially. Yeah. The key really is to take care of all the prerequisites first before you do that, not the other way around, right? So that's a great example, Justin. It's just like the pursuit of getting a deeper squat. But the way like I got a deeper squat was working on my ankle and hip mobility first, and then I would change that challenge my range of motion with lighter weight. Okay, good. I'm getting a little bit deeper in my squat. Go back, a lot of focus on mobility, test it again on deeper squat. That's kind of how I would handle these deficit deads is I would apply the mobility work that we have in performance every once in a while on your deadlift day, decide to do them light and on deficit dead to see how your form is and how it feels and to keep challenging it like that and use it, use it more as a gauge of am I getting better range of motion in my deadlifts than it is like, you know, trying to really do it. Like you see the power lifters doing it, you have totally different goals. And I'm, I'm with Sal, I mean, I haven't done deficit deadlifts in probably three or four years. So when I was doing it, it was purely because I just, I was trying to get a stronger deadlift. I wanted to get my numbers up. I had different goals back then. So just keep that in mind. Yeah. If you don't have mass performance, by the way, we'll send that over to you, Will. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that very much. No problem. Thanks for listening to the show. Yeah. Thank you, fellas. I appreciate your input and your honesty and love what you're doing. Thank you. You got it. Thanks, Will. Yeah. I think this highlights something important about advanced variations in lifts or advanced techniques like bands and chains and partial reps and negatives and deficit lifts and floor presses and all valuable. Okay. I want to be very clear, all valuable, all could provide value, improve your strength and mobility, but they're not the bread and butter. They really are not the bread and butter. And many of them require lots of preparation before you go and attempt them. And I've seen way too many times somebody go and for example, try to do deficit deadlifts and I watched their back is rounding. Yeah. And I'm like, not only is that not good technique, but you probably should be practicing. There was no weight because that four inch difference it doesn't seem like much, but it is, especially if you always train in one particular range of motion. I think where this happens or where people like why this becomes a good question or why we get asked this question is you are wanting to get stronger in your deadlift and you come across someone's page and the videos. Yeah. Exactly. And they're touting how great deficit deadlifts and you're like, Oh, well, I want to get good at deadlifts. And so, and if this has helped this person out and they're qualified, smart, whatever, or really strong, should I do it? And it's like, you know, you can get a really strong deadlift and do other things that are more valuable to your specific goals without having to do that too. I think that's the misconception is that, Oh, well, I should do that too. Well, it really depends. And if he was a client of mine, I'd really want to dive into like his goals. Like when he mentioned that about his son and like, Okay, you want to get stronger in your deadlift, we can work on that. No problem. And we can never do deficit deads and be fine with that. You also want to be mobile and you want to be able to play with your son. That's another major goal of yours. Okay, well, let's work on mobility and that be the primary focus. We'll get stronger in your deadlift along the way. We'll also get to a place where you comfortably can do deficit deadlifts. I really like what Justin said about treating it like a new exercise. If you train in this 12 inch range of motion, and that's how you constantly get stronger and stronger and stronger, there's some carryover to outside of that range of motion, but it, but the more you move outside that range of motion, the faster it diminishes to the point where a lot of that strength means almost nothing. In fact, unfamiliar territory. In fact, I'll tell you what, I've trained a lot of runners who have decent stability and stamina, right in that running range of motion. You bring them below that and they completely fall apart because they never train in that range of motion. This will happen to you too when you resistance train. If you train and you squat to parallel and you've built up a really good squat and you've moved up to 400 pounds or whatever, and you're doing great, and then you think, you know what, I'm going to try going four inches lower. So let me lighten the load. Let me go 50 pounds down from my normal weight because 50 pounds is a lot. Not nearly enough of a cut in weight. No joke. I would go down 70% and focus on connecting because the risk of injury goes up so much because you are now training in a range of motion that you really never train in. Yeah. And to make sure you have that range of motion and go through the mobility of that first, obviously as a prerequisite, it's important. I would even like probably prioritize unilateral training before I would even go into the deficit deadline. So if he was the focus more on that, right, because I mean, most the issues of strength is instability. And so to be able to kind of reinforce that by adding just like unilateral focus, I think would go much further. I 100% agree. And that's what I mean. I feel like there's a for his goals, what there's other stuff that there's many things that he could be doing that not only will he get good at his desired outcome of increasing his deadlift strength and mobility that are going to benefit him a lot more than just doing deficit debts. Totally.