Whole Body · Barbell
Deadlift
The deadlift is a barbell movement in which the lifter lifts a loaded bar from the floor to a standing position with the hips and knees locked out, and it is one of the three lifts contested in powerlifting.
How is the deadlift performed?
The bar starts on the floor over the middle of the foot. The lifter takes a grip outside the knees, sets the hips and takes the slack out of the bar, then drives the floor away and stands up, keeping the bar in contact with the legs as it travels. The lift finishes with the hips and knees locked out and the shoulders back. The bar is then returned to the floor, which is a controlled lowering rather than a drop.
What does the deadlift train?
The deadlift is the largest single expression of whole-body pulling strength, loading the posterior chain — hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors — along with the grip and the entire trunk. Because it starts from a dead stop on the floor with no stretch to rebound out of, it is the movement least able to borrow from momentum, which is part of why it tends to be the heaviest lift a person performs.
How does orcatrain score the deadlift?
Deadlift is one of the three lifts orcatrain sums into your headline strength total, alongside the squat and the bench press. This entry is the conventional pull specifically: the sumo deadlift is a separate catalogue entry and is deliberately not summed into the total, because the total is the competition three rather than your best pull from any stance.
Every scored set is turned into an estimated one-rep max, and that estimate is scored with the DOTS coefficient against your bodyweight and sex — so a set is comparable with your own past work and with lifters of a different size. Sets above ten repetitions are recorded but not scored: the estimate is a curve fit that stops being honest past that point, so orcatrain returns nothing rather than a confident guess. Weights are stored in kilograms.
Track your progress on Deadlift.
Movement names and groupings come from Strength Level, where you can also see their strength standards for this movement. DOTS is computed by orcatrain itself.