The King of Exercises

That’s what many people call the Deadlift, and for good reason. This champion of the free weight exercises hits a ton of muscle groups and hits them hard, particularly the massive “workhorse” muscles of your thighs and your back. Since this exercise recruits two of the largest and most powerful muscle groups in your body in one motion, it is usually the heaviest lift a person can perform.

There are plenty of quality guides on how to perform a deadlift properly, and for good reason: Given the large weights involved keeping good form is important to avoid injury. Unlike the Barbell Squat, where a failure could lead to dropping a heavy weight on yourself, the risk of that is minimal with a Deadlift, where the weight never gets any higher than your pelvis. The risk with deadlifts lies more in blowing out your back, which is a bad day for anyone.

Bodybuilding.com is an excellent resource for getting proper form down. I can’t do any better than them, so I will link to their resource:

Bodybuilding.com Deadlift Guide

As a beginner the Deadlift is both intimidating and deceptive. It looks easy enough, it is the simplest of all motions: Bend over, pick the heavy thing up, then put the heavy thing back down. But at the same time there are a lot of plates on that bar, and that jacked gym bro there before you was grunting and slamming that weight around like he was in a fight for his life.

Well there is. Once you do your first few sets of 5 deadlifts you can just barely finish, you’ll see what I mean. There is this strange delay after you drop the bar, like you’re body doesn’t know what to do yet. Then about 5-10 seconds later, it hits you. You’re body says “What the hell was that?” And you get a rush of nervous system overload shooting from your heels up to your chest….

Or at least I do, and no other free weight exercise does that to me.

And therefore I would highly recommend putting the Deadlifts, along with the Squats, right at the start of your routine, when you are the freshest, because they take the most out of you and use damn near your entire body between the two.

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Do you Deadlift? Is it more or less taxing to you than Barbell Squats? Sound off below and follow if you want to watch a fat guy struggle with fitness.