The Meat’s BodyBlog

The deadlift is one of the most unapreciated excercises when it comes down to increasing strength and muscle size. The deadlift is a full body lift, which means it requires every muscle in your body to help lift up the weight; whether it might be your abs which stabalize you or the back which helps out the lockout portion; every muscle has a purpose.

The key muscles involved in this deadlift are the back, glutes, hamstrings and abs. The hamstrings, glutes, lower back and abs help from the floor to the knees, the upper back and mid to low back help the lockout portion of the lift. The abs help stabalize you so you don’t lean forward and sacrifice form which might end in an injury. Ok, now that we know what muscles this lift needs, how do we go about increasing the strength of these assistance muscles? Which exercises do we perform, and how many reps and sets? Well all shall be explained below.

First things first. The main bodypart that is neglected in the lower body are the hamstrings. The hamstrings are the powerhouse for many compound lifts such as the squat and deadlift. If you have under developed and weak hamstrings then your squat and deadlift are both going to suffer because of this.

Hamstring training 101

The hamstrings need to be worked around 2-3 times a week. Work them once  2 days to be sure your hitting them enough. The primary excercises you should focus on will be: glute-ham raises, stiff legged deadlifts, good mornings (seated or standing), pull throughs. I’m not going to include squats since they are a main lift and not an assistance exercise. Pick 2 of these assistance exercises and do them on any given day. The set/rep scheme will be 2 sets of 6-8 reps. If everything is done right your hamstrings should catch up on size and strength within a month.

A solid back is another key component when striving for a big deadlift. The deadlift in itself is a key compound lift which molds and strengthens the back to perfection. As the barbell moves up it forces your lats to move outward and this provides us with a nice “V” shape to our back. Lifts which will strength key parts of the back are bend over barbell rows, weighted pullups (not chinups), dumbell rows, and hyper extentions. The set/rep scheme will be 3 sets of 5 reps for the rows and 2×10 for the extentions and pullups. The back shouldn’t be worked more than once per week in order to provide maximum recovery. The excercises I reccomend you to follow are pullups, hyper extensions and any of the two row movements. Do these excercises after you finish deadlifting.

Abs & Glutes

People often neglect to specifically do work to strengthen the abs. Sure they are worked good with squats and good mornings but they must be worked twice a week on their own for optimum strengh benefits. The exercises are just 4 sets of 10 reps weighted situps on the decline bench. You can either do those are the weighted situp machine for the same reps and sets. The glutes don’t have to be worked any extra, squats and wide grip stiff leg deadlifts target them enough.

In Conclusion…

Another tip for these exercises is that everything must be done with a progressive overload. Progressive overload means that your increasing the weight you lift in increments weekly. For example, if you do stiff leg deadlifts with 225 for 8 reps, next week increase the weight to 230 with the same reps. Progressive overload is the key component in increasing strength. In order to get stronger a particular lift every exercise associated with that lift has to increase also in order for the main lift to increase. One cannot neglect any exercise when it comes down to increasing the strength of a main lift such as the deadlift. I hope you do yourself a favor and take this advice because it took me well over 2 years to learn..