DEAD STOP DEADLIFTS ARE EASIER: THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID IT

As a practioner of touch and go deadlifts and a combatant of stupid things being said, I find myself constantly occupied and fixated with the debate between dead stop deads vs touch and go.  I’ve written at length on the topic before, expressing the value and benefit of touch and go deads, fighting against the criticism, etc etc, and in my battle I’ve avoided attempts to critique the dead stop deadlift.  However, I can no longer stand for the absurd claim made by the dead stop camp that touch and go deadlifts are in some way “easier” than dead stop deadlifts. This affront has gone on for too long, and it is time I explain the truth: you like dead stop deadlifts because they are EASIER than touch and go, not harder.

Dead deadlift?  Undeadlift?  Too many puns

Surely I’ve lost my mind, no?  It’s obvious to even the most casual observer that one can lift more weight for more reps with touch and go vs dead stop deadlifts.  Yes, and that is why we don’t take the casual observer’s word for anything, because they are uneducated and ignorant.  You can’t just direct compare dead stop deads and touch and go rep for rep, because they are blatantly different movements.  It would be akin to saying that squats are easier than front squats simply because you can lift more weight on the squat.  If ability to move more weight determined ease of movement, then the hip and thigh lift is the easiest lift in the world.  Go ahead and attempt Paul Anderson’s 6,500lbs on it.  Go on: I’ll wait for you.

With us acknowledging that touch and go and dead stops are different movements, that means we need to understand how to better compare them to determine “ease” of lift, in our quest to find out who is in fact taking the easy way out.  The method to go about doing this would be to determine some sort of training max to work with.  Determine your theoretical 1rm by taking your 5rm with both movements and calculating a 1rm based off that.  Surprise; I bet you the 1rm is higher for the touch and go vs dead stop.  And that’s the point.  When you try to determine a 1rm for touch and go, you can’t, unless, of course, you perform a top down deadlift, which is STILL not quite a touch and go off the floor.  Your “1rm touch and go” weight will of course be the same as your 1rm dead stop weight when performed with a legit 1rm, which is why you need to calculate training percentages off a rep max.  And once you do THAT, NOW the work weights you need to use to accomplish a touch and go workout are going to necessarily be HEAVIER than what is needed to perform a dead stop deadlift.  The fact you can use heavier weights with touch and go deadlift in no way means the movement is somehow easier; it’s simply different compared to deadstops.  But NOW we get to understand how the dead stop is easier.

Clearly the easiest lift possible (hey, at least it's not the bosu ball squat photo)

Alright, so we’ve taken our dead stop deadlift and our touch and go, plugged them into a program, figured out the work weights for both, so it’s time to do a direct comparison against them in an equally matched style.  “You have to break the dead stop off the floor reach rep: so it’s harder than your bouncy touch and go deadlifts!”  Ok, sure, if we wanna be stupid and say touch and go is bouncy, know what I get to observe about your dead stop deadlifts?  YOU DON’T HAVE AN ECCENTRIC PHASE!  That’s right: you’re literally doing HALF of the reps that the touch and go deadlifter is doing.  Because for every bouncy set of touch and go deadlifts you are observing, I am observing twice as many “too harder for TnG” deadlifts practically dropping the weight from the top of the rep before they start the next set.  Even lifters I am very much a fan of have employed this style

Literally dropping the bar so hard the song on the CD player kept skipping

And hey, it’s SUPER easy to have energy to break each rep off the floor when you’re only performing half a rep each time.  And know what else makes it easy?  The fact that, in your hardcoreness, you’re getting to rest IN BETWEEN REPS.  That’s right; all you folks yelling “it’s called a DEADlift for a reason” are championing the fact that you can basically rack the bar between reps on a deadlift.  That’s not a feature; that’s a bug.  What other lift lets you get away with that?  Could you imagine how much you’d flay a lifter if they claimed they squatted 500lbs for 15 reps and then released a video of them squatting 500 for a single, racking it, spending a few seconds playing with their belt and tugging on their knee sleeves before they got back under it, walked it out, got set, squatted it again, racked it, and repeated the whole ritual?  What about a dude that is racking each successive bench rep?  Some dude curling in the squat rack and dropping it on the pins between reps?  But somehow, for deadlifts, it’s a badge of HONOR to rest between reps?  And these rest periods get RIDICULOUS for many lifts.  Sets of 5 that take 2 minutes to complete, with trainees resting so long between reps they cool down and have to warm back up between reps.  Oh mighty dead stop warrior, how much you frighten me.

Know where you need to rest on a set of touch and go reps? At the top of the goddamn rep!  Ever try resting while standing up with 600lbs in your hands?  Yeah, it’s not too restful.  You’re literally FIGHTING to rest in that position, and then you somehow have to also re-brace from there before you attempt a next rep.  You don’t get the luxury of being able to re-brace from a neutral position, weight on the floor, feet perfectly set, sweat NOT running into your eyes, hands re-chalked, etc.  This is why a good touch and go deadlifter has fantastic lung capacity; they know that, once they start pulling their reps, they aren’t going to get in another good breath, so they need to knock out as many as they can in a single breath.  Which, of course, is just another way touch and go are HARDER than dead stop deads.

Hey look, Derek is even bouncing the hell out of those reps too, and I STILL wouldn't want to be holding 800lbs at the top to rest

I’m already 1000 words deep and I’m not done yet.  Once again, people make the mistake of comparing lifts to lifts as though they directly compare, because people want to talk about how deadstop deads are like pausing on a bench press, ignoring the fact that, when you pause on bench, you still have to HOLD all the weight (unless, of course, you just go limp and let it fall on your chest, in which case, good luck with all that).  Yeah, touch and go benching is easier than pause benching, but that doesn’t mean dead stop deads are tougher than touch and go, because no one is racking the bar between reps on the dead stop bench.  And should we now acknowledge the conditioning element that is contained in having to do the majority of your reps in a single breath on a set of touch and go deads, and how people that are in the “dead stop or NOTHING” tend to also be people who have let their conditioning fall apart?  And are, in turn, the same people to say that touch and go is more injurious than dead stop?  Well yeah, of course it is: for you!  Because you lack the ability to control an eccentric, mainly because you’ve been neglecting that part of your training and can’t stay braced when the eccentric comes, so of course you’re getting jacked up on a set of touch and go.  Learn how to be strong in BOTH phases, learn how to keep your brace, and THEN you’ll see that your injury rate has drastically reduced.

And this is why, whenever I compete, I pull dead stop; because it’s EASIER.  I’ve been allowed touch and go before in a competition, I tried it for one rep and I said “screw that”, because now, suddenly, I had to control the eccentric portion of a rep.  That’s TWICE as much work.  Instead, I pull the concentric, dropped the weight, and re-braced, pulled, and waited for the down command again.  Unless they were going to allow a legit bounce (which I’ve never been so luck to receive), there was no way I was going to waste the energy trying to pull touch and go.  See if you don’t make the same decision when given the same choice for pulling as many reps as possible in 60 seconds.  A 60 second AMRAP touch and go set is realistically a 30 second set followed by 30 more seconds of breathing hard collapsed on top of the barbell, but a 60 second AMRAP set dead stop gets reps through the whole 60 seconds.

If you want to challenge yourself, go pull touch and go.  If you want to take it easy, pull dead stop.