Conventional deadlift

Also called deadlift, barbell deadlift, conventional barbell deadlift.

What is a conventional deadlift?

The conventional deadlift is a barbell lift from the floor: you stand with a roughly hip-width stance behind the bar, take it with both hands just outside your legs, and stand up. "Conventional" names the narrow stance with the arms outside the knees, as opposed to sumo, where the feet are wide and the hands go inside the legs. It is a hip hinge with real knee extension in it, so the muscles that produce the movement are the hip extensors (gluteus maximus, the hamstrings, and the ischiocondylar part of adductor magnus) and the knee extensors (quadriceps femoris), while the spinal extensors are loaded heavily but hold a position instead of changing one. Nothing in the lift can help the fingers hold the bar, which is why grip is often the part that runs out first.

Anatomical illustration of a barefoot male figure performing a conventional barbell deadlift, drawn twice side by side against white. On the left he is at the start: hips back, knees bent, torso angled forward over a loaded barbell held in a double-overhand grip with both palms facing him, arms straight and hands just outside his knees. The glutes and the backs of both thighs are shaded orange. On the right he stands upright at lockout, seen from behind, the bar held at arm's length across the front of his thighs; the shading is on the glutes, the backs of both thighs and the calves, with a faint wash over the upper back and rear shoulders. The lower back is not shaded in either frame, and the fronts of the thighs are not in view.

How do you perform a conventional deadlift?

Set up

Set the bar over the middle of your foot, an inch or so from your shins.
Stand about hip width, feet flat, toes forward or turned out slightly. Keep it narrower than your squat stance so your arms can hang outside your knees.
Hinge at the hips and take the bar with straight arms just outside your shins, thumbs wrapped around the bar. Double overhand, mixed or hook: the page does not pick one for you, and the grip question below says why.
Drop your hips until your shins touch the bar, without pushing it forward. Your shoulder joint should sit directly over the bar, with the bar still over mid-foot.
Pull your chest up and set your lats, as if trying to bend the bar around your shins.
Breathe into your belly and brace. Pull the slack out of the bar until the plates settle against the collars, then start the lift.

Execution

Push the floor away rather than pulling the bar up.
Keep the bar touching or nearly touching your legs the whole way: up the shins, over the knees, up the thighs.
Let your hips and shoulders rise at the same rate off the floor.
Once the bar is past your knees, drive your hips forward into it and stand tall. Finish with hips and knees locked, shoulders pulled back if they have rounded, and ribs down.
Lower by pushing your hips back first, then bend your knees once the bar is below them.
Let the bar settle on the floor between reps, then pull. Never bounce the bar off the floor.

Common mistakes

Setting up with the bar out over your toes
The bar has to come back over the middle of your foot before it can go up, so it swings toward you as it breaks the floor and you pay for the extra distance in hip torque. Everything else in the setup is downstream of where the bar sits.
Hips shooting up before the bar moves
Your knees finish extending while the bar is still on the floor, so by the time it moves you are doing a stiff-legged deadlift at a weight you picked for a conventional one. The quadriceps did their work before the bar could feel any of it, and the hip extensors are left with the lift.
Yanking the bar off the floor from a loose start
With slack in the bar and in your arms, the first thing you accelerate is yourself. The load then arrives all at once against a back that has not finished bracing, which is both the least efficient way to start and the one that leaves you no chance to correct position.
Letting the bar drift away from your legs
Every centimetre the bar sits in front of mid-foot is more hip torque at the same weight. If a pull stalls just below the knee, that is worth checking before you conclude the back is weak: the lever may be longer than the one you set up with.
Leaning back at the top
Hips and knees locked with the shoulders back is the finish. Leaning past that adds lumbar extension to a rep that was already over, which is work the lift never asked for.
Bouncing reps off the floor
The rebound does the hardest part of the rep for you and it starts the next one from wherever the bounce left you, rather than from a position you set.

Where it fits in a session

Early in the session, first or second, while you are fresh. It is likely the heaviest thing you will lift that day and the least forgiving of a position that has already drifted.

Run it as a small number of hard sets rather than as volume, and not in every session. Rep quality is the limit: the set is over when you can no longer hold your back where you set it, not when the weight stops moving.

Muscles worked

gluteus maximus
hamstrings (biceps femoris, semitendinosus, semimembranosus)
adductor magnus (ischiocondylar portion)
quadriceps femoris
erector spinae (iliocostalis, longissimus, spinalis)
multifidus
latissimus dorsi
trapezius
forearm flexors, the finger flexors above all
abdominal wall (rectus abdominis, external oblique, internal oblique, transversus abdominis)

Split by role, not by size of contribution. The primary list is the muscles whose named actions are the lift: hip extension (gluteus maximus, the hamstrings, and the ischiocondylar part of the adductor magnus, which runs from the ischial tuberosity like a hamstring and extends the thigh like one), knee extension (quadriceps femoris), and holding the spine where you put it (erector spinae and multifidus, which work isometrically here — they are loaded hard while changing length very little). The secondary list is what carries the bar and the trunk without producing the movement. Anatomy establishes actions and attachments; it does not rank how much each muscle contributes to a deadlift, and nothing here measures what any of them does during the lift, so nothing here is a ranking. Quadratus lumborum is left off deliberately: its own anatomy chapter reports cadaver forces of roughly 200 N against about 1800 N for erector spinae and 2800 N for multifidus in the lumbar spine, and concludes it "does not appear to be a significant lumbar stabilizer".

What lifters actually do

Fewer than two in five regular RepCount lifters have ever logged a deadlift, and it turns up in roughly one workout in twenty — rarer than most of the accessory work that fills a session. What it gets when it does turn up is volume: a little over four sets, inside a session of about six exercises. The company it keeps is the more useful number. The movements most often logged in the same session are pulldowns, the squat, pull-ups, cable rows and barbell rows — four back movements and one squat — and fewer than one deadlift session in five also contains a squat. That leans toward a pull or back day rather than leg day, and it only leans: no one of those movements shows up in even a fifth of deadlift sessions.

38.4%

of regular lifters have logged it

4.38

sets per session, on average

6.1

exercises in those sessions

Most often trained alongside

Share of conventional deadlift sessions that also include each exercise.

Pulldowns19.9%
Squat18.5%
Pull up14.2%
Cable row14.2%
Barbell row14%

Figures come from workouts tracked in RepCount.

Variations

Sumo deadlift — Wide stance with the hands inside the legs. Shorter bar path, and different angles at the hip and knee.
Romanian deadlift — Starts from standing and lowers to about mid-shin with the knees only slightly bent. The bar does not return to the floor.
Stiff-legged deadlift — From the floor with the knees close to straight, so the hips do almost all of the work.
Trap bar deadlift — Hands at your sides in a hexagonal bar, which puts the load closer to the hips and lets the knees bend more.
Deficit deadlift — Standing on a plate or platform, so the bar starts lower and the range is longer.
Rack pull — Bar raised on pins or blocks, so the lift starts from above the floor.
Snatch-grip deadlift — Very wide grip, which lowers the start position and lengthens the range.
Paused deadlift — A held stop, usually just below the knee, before finishing the rep.
Dumbbell deadlift — Same hinge with a dumbbell in each hand instead of a bar.

Frequently asked questions

What muscles does the conventional deadlift work?

The movement itself is hip extension plus knee extension, so it is produced by the gluteus maximus, the hamstrings, the hamstring-like part of the adductor magnus, and the quadriceps femoris. The erector spinae and multifidus are loaded heavily but work isometrically — they hold the spine where you set it rather than moving it. Holding on adds the forearm flexors; the latissimus dorsi and trapezius keep the arm and the shoulder blade where they are; and the abdominal wall tenses against the trunk. Anatomy tells you which muscles act and where they attach; it does not tell you how the work is divided between them, so treat any ranked list of deadlift muscles with suspicion, including a ranked one from us.

Is the deadlift a back exercise or a leg exercise?

Both descriptions point at something real, which is why the argument never ends. The joints that move are the hips and the knees, so the muscles doing the moving are leg muscles. The back muscles are under heavy load for the whole rep but they are holding a position rather than changing one, and holding a position under load is still work. If you want one sentence: the legs move the bar and the back holds the shape you set while they do it.

What is the difference between a conventional and a sumo deadlift?

Stance width and where your hands go. Conventional is roughly hip-width with the arms hanging outside the knees; sumo is a wide stance with the hands inside the legs. Both start from the floor and finish standing. The wide stance shortens the distance the bar travels and changes the angles at the hip and knee, so the two feel different and suit different builds — that is a matter of which one fits you, not of one being the real version.

Should I deadlift with a double overhand, mixed or hook grip?

It is a preference, and this page does not pick one for you. Double overhand is symmetrical and usually what limits you first. A mixed grip, one palm forward and one back, stops the bar rolling out of your fingers but leaves the two arms doing different things. A hook grip traps the thumb under the fingers, holds like a mixed grip and stays symmetrical, and hurts until it stops hurting. Straps are a fourth answer when the point of the set is the legs and back rather than the grip. Any single illustration can only show one of these, so read the one you see as an example rather than an instruction.

Do deadlifts work your quads?

Yes, in the conventional version from the floor. Your knees are bent at the start and straighten as the bar comes up, and the quadriceps femoris is the knee extensor. How much they contribute depends on how much knee bend your start position actually has, which varies with limb lengths and with how you set up. Variations that start with the knees nearly straight, like the stiff-legged and Romanian deadlift, remove most of that.

Do deadlifts work the lower back?

Heavily, but as a holding job. The spinal extensors — erector spinae and multifidus — resist the trunk being folded forward by the bar rather than extending it. One muscle from the same region is missing from that pair on purpose: the anatomy reference cited on this page reports cadaver forces of roughly 200 N for the quadratus lumborum in the lumbar spine against about 1800 N for erector spinae and 2800 N for multifidus, and concludes it is not a significant lumbar stabiliser.

How often do people actually deadlift?

Less often than you might guess from how much is written about it. Across workouts tracked in RepCount, fewer than two in five regular lifters have ever logged a deadlift, and it appears in roughly one workout in twenty. When it does appear it gets a little over four sets, in a session of about six exercises. The movements logged alongside it most often are pulldowns, the squat, pull-ups, cable rows and barbell rows. A logged deadlift does not record which stance it was pulled from, so those figures describe the lift rather than the conventional version of it specifically.

Should I reset every rep or use touch-and-go?

Reset. Let the bar settle on the floor, take the slack out again, then pull, so every rep starts from a dead bar in a position you chose. Touch-and-go keeps tension on and gets through a set faster, but it skips the hardest part of the rep, breaking a still bar off the floor, and starts the next one from wherever the bar happened to touch down. Set the bar down under control, and never use the floor as a spring.

Sources

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