Thought experiment:

If your goal is to build muscle, get and stay lean, and not get injured . . . and you don’t care about lifting as much weight as possible or competing in powerlifting . . . is there any point in deadlifting?

Dyed-in-the-wool deadlifters blow a gasket if you even pose this question.

OF COURSE YOU MUST DEADLIFT! IT’S ONE OF THE BIG THREE LIFTS! IT TRAINS LITERALLY EVERY MUSCLE IN YOUR BODY!

You can see their yellow calloused fingers smashing these words into the keyboard as they spew whey protein across their computer monitor.

Then you have the overly cautious gym marms who warn that deadlifting is playing Russian roulette with your spine because bio-mechano-magical functional voodoo reasons.

As you can guess, my position is somewhere in the middle. When programmed and practiced correctly, the deadlift can be a safe and effective muscle-building exercise for many.

But it also has real downsides that may make it a suboptimal exercise for others.

Allow me to explain . . .

What Makes a “Good” Exercise for Building Muscle?

To answer the question “are deadlifts good for building muscle,” we first need to understand what makes a “good” muscle-building exercise.

There are three criteria:

The exercise trains the target muscle through a sufficient range of motion.

Muscle growth is an entirely localized process. If you want a muscle to grow, you need to force it to produce very high levels of tension for a sufficient number of repetitions.1

This sounds obvious, but many exercises don’t train muscles as effectively as people think.

For example, many people think deadlifts are a great exercise for building the lats. Deadlifts train the back, and the lats are on your back, ergo the deadlift must be a good lat-builder, right?

Not really. While the lats are activated during the deadlift, it’s not usually enough to produce significant muscle growth. You generally need to do other exercises to see meaningful lat gains.

This is the inherent tradeoff with compound exercises (exercises that train many different muscles at the same time). On the one hand, these exercises allow you to move a lot of weight and train many different muscles simultaneously. On the other hand, not every muscle gets trained equally, and some muscles inevitably get more of a tension stimulus than others.

This is the advantage of isolation exercises—they all but guarantee you’re training the target muscle with sufficient tension.

Think of it this way: When you stop a heavy set of deadlifts, why did you stop? What muscle was the limiting factor?  Your spinal erectors? Hamstrings? Glutes? Traps? Forearms?

While you might have an inkling, it’s impossible to know for sure. What’s more, even if you could somehow figure out exactly which muscle failed first, there’s not much you can do about it.

This problem isn’t unique to deadlifts. For instance, many people find that their triceps give out while bench pressing before their pecs. You can partially correct this with proper cueing and technique, but most people still find that they gain more muscle if they use accessory exercises to target the pecs, like the cable fly, pec deck, and chest press machine.

In other words, the more muscles an exercise trains, the harder it is to determine which muscle is receiving the bulk of the muscle-building stimulus.

Some people will counter that the deadlift (or squat, or bench press, or overhead press, etc.) trains “everything,” and this is true to a degree—these exercises do activate a huge number of different muscles. But they don’t activate every muscle equally, and some muscles end up getting trained more than others.

None of this is to say that compound exercises are “bad” for building muscle, but they usually aren’t sufficient for maximizing muscle growth.

The exercise can be progressed effectively over time.

Once a muscle has adapted to a particular load, that load becomes less and less effective at stimulating muscle growth. The best way to keep progressing is to add weight.2

This is the basis of progressive tension overload—the key driver of muscle growth—and some exercises make this easier than others.3

For instance, periodically adding 5 pounds to your bench press is straightforward, but it’s a lot less practical with an exercise like push-ups, especially once you become reasonably strong. This is why barbell, dumbbell, and machine exercises are generally more effective for building muscle than bodyweight exercises.

This is also a big advantage of compound exercises like the deadlift—you can keep adding weight for years, albeit in tiny increments.

It suits your biomechanics.

Not every exercise suits everyone’s biomechanics.

Take the squat. How deep you can squat depends largely on the depth of your hip sockets.

People with deeper, more enclosed hip sockets (sometimes called “Celtic” or “Scottish” hips, since this anatomy is more common in people of Northern European descent) tend to have a harder time squatting deep.

People with shallower hip sockets (sometimes called “Dalmatian hips,” more common among people of Eastern European descent) tend to have no trouble squatting “ass-to-grass.”

No amount of stretching or mobility is going to change the anatomy of your hip sockets, and trying to force yourself to squat deeper than your anatomy allows is a surefire way to injure your lower back.

The deadlift has similar quirks. If you have long legs and short arms, you’ll have to pull the bar further than someone with shorter legs and longer arms—which means the lift will feel harder and more awkward, which makes it harder to progress over time, which makes it harder to get an effective muscle-building stimulus.

So that’s the test: a great muscle-building exercise trains the target muscle with sufficient tension, lets you load it progressively, and suits your biomechanics.

With those three rules in mind, how does the deadlift measure up?

The Pros and Cons of Deadlifting for Muscle Gain

The biggest downside of the deadlift as a muscle-building exercise is that it doesn’t stimulate all of the muscles it trains equally.

More specifically, the deadlift activates almost every muscle on the back of your body (the posterior chain), including your hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors, traps, lats, and as a bonus, your forearms and quads.

That said, your spinal erectors and other low-back muscles typically gas out first, leaving the rest of these muscles under-trained. Thus, there’s truth to the idea that the deadlift is a “jack of all trades and master of none” (except for your spinal erectors). And let’s be honest—most people aren’t overly concerned with growing their spinal erectors.

Another problem is that many of the muscles trained by the deadlift are trained through a very short range of motion, or only isometrically.

For example, while the deadlift does train your hamstrings to a degree, an exercise like the hamstring curl trains them through a much longer range of motion. And while the lats and traps help stabilize your body during deadlifts, they don’t really move through any range of motion. Instead, they just contract isometrically at short muscle lengths, which is a much weaker muscle-building stimulus than training through a full range of motion under load.4

You can always do accessory exercises to train muscles not fully stimulated by the deadlift, but that’s the point—the deadlift alone isn’t sufficient to get the job done for most people.

As explained above, this can be exacerbated by your biomechanics. If you have long legs and short arms, you’ll be forced to lean forward more than others, which forces your low-back muscles to work even harder, which makes them fatigue even earlier in your sets. Your erectors are fully cooked while your hamstrings, glutes, quads, traps, and lats are all ready for more.

Some people also don’t find deadlifts comfortable. For whatever reason—long legs, deep hip sockets, short arms, long torso, or some combination of everything—the deadlift just doesn’t play nicely with their proportions, which makes it hard to progress over time.

Another problem with the deadlift is that it’s exhausting, which creates several problems.

First, this makes them unsafe to take to true failure (especially if your form isn’t dialed). While almost everyone can learn to deadlift safely, your margin for error is lower than with most other exercises. It’s a lot harder to hurt yourself doing hamstring curls and hip thrusts, for instance, even when you take them to failure.

Second, it means you generally need to deadlift before other exercises in your workouts to maintain proper form, which also means that you’re doing every subsequent exercise in a fatigued state. That’s a high price to pay for an exercise that doesn’t fully stimulate most of the muscles involved.

Third, it also makes your workouts harder to confront. When you’re dieting, sleep-deprived, or drained from a long day, a few sets of hamstring curls and back extensions are much easier to tackle than several sets of heavy deadlifts.

(Note that while the deadlift doesn’t “dRaIN yOuR cEnTrAl nErVoUs sYsTeM” the way many people claim, it still takes a lot more chutzpah to do a hard set of deadlifts than most other exercises.)5

All of that said, deadlift does offer several major benefits:

  1. It’s a fantastic exercise for strengthening and building your lower-back muscles. Some research also suggests that deadlifts may help reduce low-back pain, probably by strengthening the muscles and connective tissues in that part of your body.6
  2. While it doesn’t train most muscles “optimally,” it does train a bunch of different muscles simultaneously, which still makes it a time-efficient exercise. This is particularly true during your first several years of weightlifting, when you generally don’t need to worry about bringing up individual muscles. Even a “suboptimal” stimulus can still cause great newbie gains.
  3. It’s fun. Many people (myself included) genuinely love deadlifting. And if it gets you fired up to train, that’s a strong reason to keep it in your program, so long as you keep your ego in check.

Should You Deadlift to Build Muscle?

This depends on your goals.

Let’s revisit the question I posed at the beginning of this article: If your goal is to build muscle, get and stay lean, and not get injured … and you don’t care about lifting as much weight as possible or competing in powerlifting … is there any point in deadlifting?

Not really.

From a pure muscle-building standpoint, no—you don’t need to deadlift. You can gain just as much muscle without deadlifts as you can with them if you program your workouts properly.

If you don’t particularly enjoy deadlifting, don’t care about your powerlifting totals, and would rather put the energy you’d spend deadlifting into other exercises, then you’re better off not deadlifting.

That said, it’s also incorrect to say that deadlifts are inherently dangerous or a “bad” muscle-building exercise. While they may not fully stimulate many of the muscles involved, they’re still a time-efficient way to partially train many different muscles simultaneously.

If you enjoy deadlifts and they suit your biomechanics, and so long as you use proper technique, add weight gradually, and don’t take your sets to failure, they’re worth including in your program.

If you don’t particularly enjoy deadlifts, they feel awkward or uncomfortable, and you choose other effective exercises to train your hamstrings, glutes, erectors, lats, and traps, you aren’t missing out by skipping them, either.

Scientific References +