Deficit Deadlift
Trains the Spinal Erectors.
- Equipment
- A barbell and either a box or a weight plate
- Mechanic
- Compound
- Force
- Pull
- Level
- Intermediate
How to do it
- Stand on a platform or plates one to three inches high with a loaded barbell over the middle of your feet.
- Take an overhand or mixed grip just outside your legs.
- Set your hips lower than usual, chest up, back flat — the deficit forces both.
- Push the floor away and lift the bar, keeping it against your legs.
- Stand tall at the top without leaning back.
- Lower along the same path, remembering the floor is further away than usual.
Common mistakes
- Standing on a platform high enough that the back rounds at the start. The deficit adds range at the bottom, and the moment the spine has to round to reach it, the extra height is being paid for by the wrong tissue.
- Keeping your usual deadlift weight. The extra inches are added at the hardest point of the lift, so the load comes down rather than staying.
- Setting up on a platform that can shift. A plate stack that slides mid-pull moves the ground under a loaded bar.
- Lowering as if the floor were where it usually is. The bar has further to travel, and a bar dropped onto a platform edge bounces somewhere unhelpful.