Deadlifts work both your legs and back, emphasizing your glutes, hamstrings, lower back, and traps. The muscles in your legs lift the weight, and the muscles in your back stabilize your posture. Both get worked hard enough to stimulate muscle growth.
If you have a long torso, your back will be harder to stabilize, and you might find yourself limited by the strength of your lower back. In that case, deadlifts can stimulate more muscle growth in your lower back than in your legs. You can shift the emphasis back to your legs by switching from conventional deadlifts to sumo or Romanian deadlifts.
If you have a short torso, your back might be fairly easy to stabilize, so the deadlift becomes much more of a leg exercise. Your traps will still need to work quite hard, though. It’s still a great back exercise. You can make it even more of a back exercise by doing snatch-grip or deficit deadlifts.
The deadlift works your hips, hamstrings, spinal erectors, lats, traps, rhomboids, rear delts, rotator cuff, and forearms (study). That makes it one of the best back exercises and one of the best leg exercises. The muscles in your back and forearms are stabilizers, though. They don’t move the weight.
If you want to make the deadlift more of a lower-body exercise, you can do Romanian deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, or good mornings. If you want to make it more of an upper-body exercise, you can extend the range of motion by using a snatch grip or deadlifting with a deficit. You could also swap the deadlift for a barbell row, where your legs serve as stabilizers, and your back lifts the weight.
Where Should You Program the Deadlift?
Push/Pull/Legs: Pull Day or Leg Day?
If you’re following a 6-dayPush/Pull/Legs Split, you should put your deadlifts on Leg Day. You already have two Leg Days per week. That’s plenty. One of them can have a big squat and a small deadlift, the other can have a big deadlift and a small squat:
If you’re following an Upper/Lower Split, you should count deadlifts as a lower-body exercise. That way, you give your lower back more time to rest. That will have you training your back every workout, but that’s good. Your back can handle higher training volumes and frequencies than most other muscle groups.
Bro Split: Back Day or Leg Day?
If you’re following a Bro Split, you can program deadlifts on Leg Day or Back Day. Putting deadlifts on Back Day allows you to train your legs twice per week. Putting deadlifts on Leg Day lets you train your back twice per week. Training your muscles at least twice per week is ideal for building muscle, so it works well either way.
The concern is that if you spread your squats and deadlifts throughout the week, your lower back might not have enough time to recover. That can happen, especially if you’re doing them two days in a row. You can solve that by splitting the days up:
On the other hand, part of the fun of following a Bro Split is getting all your leg exercises done on Leg Day, giving you more vigour to train your other muscles during your other workouts. That isn’t wrong. It’s nice to do chin-ups and rows while you’re feeling fresher.
Takeaway
The deadlift is a back and leg exercise, and that’s a good thing. It’s a great overall muscle-builder. Some workout routines try to split your body up into distinct parts. You can’t really do that. Your quads and abs might get sore after overhead pressing. Your hamstrings get worked during barbell rows. Front squats are one of the best exercises for your upper back.
If you let your exercises work many different muscles at once, those muscles get trained more often, you accumulate more volume per week, and you grow faster.
Push/Pull/Legs: Deadlifts go on Leg Day.
Upper/Lower Split: Deadlifts go in the Lower Body workout.
Bro Split: Deadlifts go on Back Day or Leg Day.
Alright, that’s it for now. If you want to learn more about the big compound exercises, I recommend this article.
Shane Duquette is the co-founder of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell. He's a certified conditioning coach with a degree in design from York University in Toronto, Canada. He's personally gained 70 pounds and has over a decade of experience helping over 10,000 skinny people bulk up.
Marco Walker-Ng is the co-founder and strength coach of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell, and is a certified trainer (PTS) with a Bachelor's degree in Health Sciences (BHSc) from the University of Ottawa. His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes.
