Deadlifts are KILLING Your Gains (OH SH*T!)

The deadlift is one of the most fundamental exercises you can include in any strength program, but is it killing your gains? In this video, I react to the recent interview Robert Oberst did with Joe Rogan on the JRE podcast in which the world champion strongman stated that unless you were a competit

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I want to talk to you about the deadlift. And what’s sparking this discussion here today is a recent appearance by Strong Man, Robert Oberst, on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Now, I didn’t need the viewers to alert me to this, as they have, because I listen to the podcast. I’m a fan of Joe’s podcast. C. T. Fletcher has been on there, Sylvester Stallone is going to be on there; I listen to it often.

There’s a lot of content in this podcast, but one thing in particular that has people bent and they want to know what I think about it is this statement. I don’t want to take anything out of context. I want to just play it for you so you can listen to it for yourself. ROBERT: I went from football to Strong Man, and in football we’ve never done deadlifts. It was all hang-cleans and power-cleans.

Which, by the way, just a quick tip: deadlifts, if you’re deadlifting to be a better dead-lifter, fine. If you’re not doing that for deadlift’s sake, then don’t f**king do it. The risk to reward ratio is a joke. JOE: For deadlifts? ROBERT: For deadlifts.

JOE: Really? ROBERT: I mean, a lot of people aren’t going to like that I’m saying that, but if you go into any NFL gym, or any division I college football gym, and any athletics where people are actually getting paid, and it matters what they’re doing; they’re not deadlifting. JOE: Really? ROBERT: They’re hang-cleaning and power-cleaning. JOE: Why is that?

ROBERT: It’s the risk to reward ratio. It’s so hard to be a great dead-lifter and not risk your low back and- JOE: Oh. ROBERT: And to be using your upper back properly. There are so many little chances for you to get hurt. JEFF: All right, guys.

Before you go and try to jump down Robert’s throat or assume what I’m going to say in response to that, I think we have to do a couple of things. Number one: we’re going to have to apply some context to what he said, and we’ll do that in a second. Number two: we’re going to have to start with the admission that, guys, I’m obviously someone who’s already buried a few exercises myself. I threw, willfully, a couple of exercises into my Iron Graveyard to never be performed again. One of them being the upright row, which was a sht exercise then, will be a sht exercise in the future, and is a sh*t exercise now.

I’ll say that because, as we know, you are literally fighting your own body’s anatomy to perform it and we have alternatives that provide a better response, nullifying the reason that we would ever have to do it in the first place. We could say the same thing about the behind-the-neck shoulder press. Neither of those are necessary and I think they deserve to be dead and buried. However, when it comes to the deadlift that’s not something I would ever say. I believe the deadlift is one of the most fundamental movement patterns, let alone training exercises.

The deadlift is something that we all need to be able to incorporate into our training programs and figure out a way to strengthen ourselves, but [do it] the right way. Which leads us to some of the context of what Robert’s talking about. I’ll start with the professional athlete side of it because I think what he’s saying there, there’s a lot of truth and merit to that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in a lot of professional sports weight rooms. I’ve been in around a lot of professional athletes and trained a lot of professional athletes.

And I’ll tell you this: one of the revelations you learn early on is that they’re not the best lifters. A lot of times they don’t even have great form in the weight room. They didn’t get there by being great lifters. They got here because of their innate talents. They got there because of their athleticism.

They got there because of their ability to compensate their way there. They’re masters of compensation. They were able to overcome things that we may not be able to while being able to still excel and perform. A lot of times what you’re left with is guys that come to the weight room that are limited in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, not forcing everybody to perform a lift because you know how valuable that lift is, is one of the best ways a strength coach can go.

I know the Oakland Raiders, my buddy is a strength coach for the Oakland Raiders, and not everybody deadlifts straight from the floor. There are guys that are 6’ 8”, 320lbs to guys that are defensive backs, and skilled position players that lift a bit differently, and approach it a bit differently, and their bodies align differently when they go there. Again, if you realize that, unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that they’re not all getting there as great lifters. Like I said. Their high school years, their formative years, the first time they ever learned the deadlift could have been founded on a foundation that was severely cracked because no one ever instilled in them the right way to do it.

And they brought that with them to college. And they brought that with them to the pros. While you try to intervene, it’s not always something you’re capable of intervening on because, as I’ve said before, even their ability to master the compensation here could hide some of those cracked flaws in their foundation. So, what they do with the Raiders is, they lift with mats off the floor. They put ½” mats and they might elevate a few mats – two, three, four mats – to allow the weights to come a little bit off the floor to get them into a better body position.

Not foregoing the deadlift altogether, but even as Robert said, the exercises he said, yes, they’ll perform those as well because they could provide some additional benefits that might not subject somebody to the risk. He talked about the risk to reward ratio. That’s a real issue, guys. When you’re talking about people that are being paid to play. Being paid to play and who can excel at the highest levels without necessarily having an 800lb deadlift.

What is the risk of pushing somebody in that direction? Is it going to get them stronger? Of course. But if there are other ways to get them stronger and more powerful, maybe you don’t go down that road because you don’t want to compromise somebody’s career that way. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is, we talked about the context. The context is, as the speaker, as a professional Strong Man, Robert is looking at this from a different perspective. He’s looking out for us. He’s looking out for you. He knows that, for him, the risk to reward ratio is different.

For him, the reward was higher. He could win a competition. He could sacrifice his form a little bit if it meant getting up another 10lbs or 20lbs on a lift because for him, it could mean the difference between winning and losing. When you add some competitiveness to this, and overly the performance of that lift there’s a different drive. There’s a different motivator.

But for him, it led to some other issues. Obviously, breakdown. It’s something he’s doing repetitively and he’s doing it for a living. At least the breakdown. These are not the same things that we would have to consider.

But it brings me back to this overall point: the deadlift is a great exercise. The deadlift is a fundamental movement pattern. But the deadlift should be done responsibly. It’s one of those exercises that, because of the loading parameters here, because we can load it up a lot as we’re pursuing strength on that lift, we have to understand this one, critical factor. That is that it’s not the number of the plates on the side of the bar that will ultimately determine your strength.

What matters the most is that the tru