Completely replacing deadlifts with RDL’s

A few training cycles ago I replaced my 2nd deadlift day which was paused DL’s with deficit Romanian DL’s . I did this because I no longer care about my 1 rep maxes .

im thinking about taking that even further. I made my main DL day paused for higher reps. I’m still finding that they’re fatiguing my back more than I’d like. Would I be missing out on a ton by swapping those out for deficit paused Romanian DL’s?

my only thought would be possibly missing out on back gains but I’m already doing 13 sets a week of dedicated back work between rows and lat pulldowns.

To directly answer your question, I think it is unlikely that the magnitude of health benefit you get from lifting weights is different between paused deadlift and deficit (?) paused RDL’s. You could definitely do that.

That said, I think avoiding movements due to loading issues is not really something I like to do. If it were me or I was coaching you, I would probably push you to do regular deadlifts at a lighter load/lower RPE to train the hinge pattern. I do not think there’s much carry over for training the hinge pattern from rows and lat pulldowns.

Still, I don’t think that deadlifts are terribly well-suited for a high rep DL slot compared to other training options such as the RDL, ironically. I also don’t love high rep paused variants, as I think the point of the pause - isometric strength and posture control- makes it more suitable to lower rep ranges.

Jordan,

Thank you for the response. My current goals are hypertrophy, running, and jiu jitsu. Do you think even with these goals I’d benefit in keeping the deadlift ? I kinda assumed I could get the same posterior hypertrophy with RDL but am open to switching back to regular deadlifts at a lighter load.

the reason I went to higher rep paused is I thought it would be a good way to control load and force me to use lighter weight , still seems to beat my lower back up though.

I think RDL’s or deadlifts would be fine for lower limb hypertrophy, though the entire program matters with respect to exercise selection.

I think if back fatigue is a consistent issue some programming adjustments may be necessary.

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