10 Deadlift Benefits That Will Have You Pumping Iron Like No Tomorrow

Opposed to common knowledge, deadlifting is not only for those giant muscle men you see at the gym. Deadlifts can be a very useful type of weightlifting, or to be exact, powerlifting exercise to do. Yes, it is a strenuous and challenging type of exercise to do, but it has a whole lot of benefits that come along with deadlifts.

If you have never tried deadlifts before, you may want to start out small and then build your way up to avoid injury, but rest assured, a few deadlifts per week and you will be well on your way to a healthier you.

Benefit #1: It’s a Safe Weightlifting Exercise

While we can’t rule out some muscle strains and pain from deadlifting the wrong way or with bad posture, generally speaking, it is a fairly safe weightlifting exercise to engage in. This is because all you are doing is lifting the weight from the ground to the height of your waist and then lowering it back down.

If you feel as though you can’t lift it or are slipping, all you have to do is drop the bar. Sure, it might make a really loud noise when it hits the ground, but that is about the extent of the damage done. This is not so for many other weightlifting exercises, such as bench pressing for example, where you can lose your grip and get pinned under a heavy bar, something that can be quite dangerous.

This is also true for presses because when you lift a heavy bar above your head, it has the potential to pull you backward and cause you to fall over. Therefore, even though there are always risks associated with lifting extreme amounts of weight, deadlifting is one of the safer types of lifts to do.

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Benefit #2: Better Grip Strength

A big benefit that you can get from deadlifting is that it will help to greatly improve your grip strength. Your fingers, hands, and wrists are effectively the only things that connect the rest of your body to the heavy weight bar.

When you lift this bar up, especially with an excessive amount of weight, it forces you to use your fingers, and thus also the muscles in your forearms in order to lift it. Over time this will not only allow you to lift the weight much easier but will also increase your ability to hold onto it without slipping.

Having good grip strength is not only important for weightlifting exercises, but also for many other aspects of your daily life. Just think about it, when you write a lot, whether on paper or on the computer, your hands will get tired pretty quickly. Well, having better grip strength and stronger fingers means that you won’t get cramps in your hand from a few minutes of writing.

Grip strength is also important for sports such as football, baseball, tennis, and a few other things too. This is a benefit that comes in pretty handy all throughout your day, and that even goes for simple things like carrying groceries, lifting up your child, or pushing a baby stroller downhill.

Benefit #3: Burning Lots Of Calories

Deadlifting is a very caloric intensive exercise to do, especially when you lift very heavy loads. Usually, weight lifting exercises are not known to be overly effective in terms of weight loss, but that is not so when you are lifting such extreme amounts.

It takes a whole lot of energy for your muscles to deadlift a large amount, and that energy has to come from somewhere. The energy that your body uses to fuel your weightlifting endeavors comes from the food that you eat.

The more food you eat, the more energy you have to deadlift, and the more you deadlift, the more calories you burn. If you have not eaten all that much food, your body won’t have enough calories to fuel itself, in which case your body will resort to eating up fat reserves for energy.

This of course means that deadlifting can also help you lose a fair amount of weight. Another well known fact is that most forms of exercise, deadlifting included, will help boost your metabolism. In other words, your metabolic rate will be increased, which means that your body burns an increased number of calories compared to what it usually would.

Moreover, intense exercise like this increases your EPOC or exercise post oxygen consumption, which means that your metabolism stays revved up for a prolonged period after you have finished exercising. As you can see, deadlifting can actually help you lose weight in a number of different ways.

Benefit #4: Working Out Your Whole Body

Another big benefit that you can reap from doing deadlifts on a regular basis is that it works out virtually every muscle in your body. Deadlifting is a compound exercise that works out multiple muscle groups at once.

A deadlift works out your legs because your legs are what support your body, and thus the weight of the bar. The deadlift requires you to use the muscles in your feet, your calf muscles, your quads, your glutes and hamstrings, your core, your lower back, and of course your arms too. On the note of making your legs stronger, that in itself comes with quite the list of benefits.

Having a stronger base means that you will have an easier time supporting yourself. The stronger your legs are the easier it is to stand on your feet, walk, and run for a prolonged period of time. In essence, deadlifts make your legs stronger, and that helps to improve your overall physical performance. You will be able to stand better, run longer, and jump higher.

There is also the fact that having stronger legs will also help you balance better. After all, they are what holds you up, and the stronger your legs are the more ability they have to balance, something that becomes useful in old age for things like preventing unnecessary slips and falls.

Working out all of these muscles has a great number of benefits for your body. If you want to achieve a really muscular look and have a well-rounded body that is strong from top to bottom, deadlifting is definitely something to consider, especially because it works out all of your muscles at once, thus being a very efficient type of exercise.

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Benefit #5: Better Posture & Less Back Pain

Another benefit that you can get from doing deadlifts on a regular basis is that they help to give you better posture. As we mentioned before, when you do deadlifts, you are forced to engage your core muscles including your stomach muscles and your lower back muscles. This of course results in the strengthening of those muscles.

Well, bad posture usually arises from having weak core and back muscles, because they aren’t strong enough to support you and keep you upright. If you have bad posture for a prolonged period of time, it can actually change the shape of your bones, thus permanently changing the way you stand.

Moreover, this can also result in back pain and more severe long-term problems. Deadlifts can help deal with that problem of bad posture because they help to strengthen your core muscles, or in other words, the muscles that keep you upright.

The stronger your core muscles are, the easier it is for you to keep yourself in a straight and upright position, thus reducing back pain, reducing the chances of suffering long-term problems, and giving you that confident look of a man or woman who stands up straight.

Benefit #6: Relatively Cheap

Something else that is definitely good about doing deadlifts is that they are actually relatively cheap to do. First off, you don’t even need to buy your own weights. You can just go use the ones that are already available in your local gym.

This is pretty cheap when you think about it because most gym memberships don’t cost much more than 40 or 50 bucks per month, not to mention that you get access to all of their other equipment too.

On the other hand, if you would rather work out at home, you can go to some kind of discount or thrift store to buy second-hand weights and a bar that will end up costing a fraction of the price of new weights. In all fairness, you can always buy the necessary equipment brand new.

It may be a little pricey at first, but to be fair, it is a one time buy. It’s not like you have to buy new weights every time you go to do a deadlift.

Benefit #7: Bone Building

Yet another benefit of doing deadlifts is that they help to build your bone mass, strength, and density. This is because doing deadlifts count as a weight bearing exercise, otherwise known as a bone building exercise.

You see, any time you engage in an exercise such as deadlifts that forces you to put an increased strain or amount of weight on your legs or other parts of your body, it causes something to happen.

These weight bearing exercises, due to putting an increased strain on your bones, actually cause them to grow. In essence, your bones build in size and strength just like your muscles do. The more you train them and the more stress you put on them, the bigger, stronger, and denser they get.

Your osteoblasts are the things in your bones which produce more bone mass, and when they are strained through a weight bearing exercise, they are signaled to start making new bone mass, thus making your bones larger and denser.

Having stronger bones is of course a good thing because it reduces the chances of suffering a fracture or break when you fall and it helps to reduce the chances of developing some kind of degenerative bone disease in the future.

Benefit #8: Deadlifts Are Useful For Real Life

The fact of the matter is that many types of weight lifting, while they do make you stronger, don’t really translate into real life all that well. Just put it this way, how often do you lie on your back and press several hundred pounds into the air?

How often do you stand up vertically and lift several hundred pounds directly above your head? The point we are trying to make is that many different weight lifting exercises do not strengthen the muscles that you use for everyday tasks.

Sure, you might use those muscles every now and again, but you are really just strengthening them so you can lift more weight the next time. Deadlifts, on the other hand, do train muscles that you use in your everyday life.

Just think about it, we lift things up off of the ground all the time, which is exactly what deadlifting trains you for. Whether it is picking up your children, carrying groceries, lifting bags of dirt for your garden, or moving your sofa or giant oak dining room table around the home, doing deadlifts will train the muscles that will make all of those lifting jobs much easier in the long run.

Yes, deadlifts make you stronger just like other weightlifting exercises, but deadlifts are one of the only ones that actually prove to be useful in your everyday life.

Benefit #9: They Can Help Prevent Injuries

Yet another benefit that you can get from doing deadlifts on a regular basis is that they can help prevent other injuries from occurring. Deadlifts help to strengthen the muscles that support tendons and ligaments around your body.

Moreover, they also help build muscle mass around crucial joints such as your knees and hips. Having stronger muscles supporting your tendons, ligaments, and joints is very useful for preventing injuries. Simply put, the joints that connect the various parts of your body end up being much stronger thanks to some simple deadlifts and the increased amount of support they help provide.

Benefit #10: An Increase In The Production Of Good Hormones

The final thing that we want to mention about deadlifts is that they help to increase the production of several hormones in your body. The heavy amount of lifting that is involved in deadlifting stimulates your body to create an increased amount of testosterone.

Testosterone is a great thing for the male body to be producing in excess because it helps to stimulate increased muscle growth and faster muscle recovery. Not only is testosterone good for your muscles, but it is also great for things like increasing your sexual drive, making you feel better mentally, and it even helps with hair growth too.

On that same note, exercises like the deadlift also help your body to increase its production of HGH or human growth hormone. Human growth hormone has the purpose of increasing muscle growth and speeding up recovery, it helps make bones stronger, it assists in fat loss, and it also helps to promote the healing of tissues. As you can see, deadlifting has a ton of different benefits that help make you a stronger person.

Conclusion

Deadlifts aren’t just good for turning you into a hulking mountain of a human being, and as you can see, there are many different positive aspects of engaging in this type of weightlifting exercise. Yes, it’s going to make you sweat and groan every single time you lift that bar, but in the end, it is all worth it. You will end up being a stronger, more balanced, well-rounded, and sleeker individual. You should seriously try some deadlifts because you won’t know how much good they can really do until you experience the deadlift benefits firsthand.

If you have any questions or comments about doing deadlifts, feel free to ask us anything or leave us a comment and we will get back to you in no time at all. The benefits of deadlifts are waiting for you to take advantage of them!