I think I don’t like deadlifts. Aside from recurring injuries that I have associated with deads, I just don’t really enjoy them. I don’t really mind cycling a deadlift variation every cycle, but I don’t enjoy them. RDLs and SLDLs are fine for sets of 8 or so. Maybe comp deads for higher reps would be too? Part of me wants to just squat more. I do love me my squats.
My question is: does anybody else dislike deadlifts? What do you do?
Absolutely agreed. They’re the only lift that I actively dread, which is almost certainly part of the reason that I can’t make any progress with them. I can’t seem to gain any confidence in them, and I tweak my back when I work up to a certain weight every single time, no matter what I try to do to avoid it.
I do them as written in the templates that I run, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be very good at doing them, which is fine, as I have no interest in competing at all.
Deadlifts are usually my favorite/best lift, but I currently hate them because I still haven’t quite gotten back to my old numbers after tweaking my back a few months ago. I’m sure that’ll change soon enough with some patience, though.
I’m going to assume that you don’t compete in, nor have aspirations for competing in, a strength sport and train for either general strength, aesthetics, health, or a some combination of the three. I don’t think it would be particularly wise to just replace all deadlifting in your program with more squatting - you would likely benefit from continuing to train your posterior chain/hip hinge in some way. However, you don’t necessarily have to do deadlifts in any particular way to do this, and depending on your goals, traditional deadlifting from the floor may even be a suboptimal choice. Depending on your goals and/or preferences, you could really do anything - conventional, sumo, trap/hex bar, block or rack pulls, RDLs, SLDLs, snatch grip, etc. The BBM training philosophy generally isn’t very dogmatic. Have some fun experimenting with some different deadlift/hip hinge/posterior chain training and find something that you can tolerate and adhere to.
Seconding this. I’ve found that, although I tend to really dislike standard DLs, I actually really tend to enjoy other similar movements, like RDLs. If you have no desire to compete, I, personally, would recommend trying out all sorts of DL variants. You may find some that you actually enjoy.
I hated it when I first started doing it. Especially because I had a very bad back and it lasted for three months. Then I realized that I need to strengthen my back more. But it did not help either. It’s still hard, especially if I have a lot of weight.
Remember that you don’t have to do anything. If you don’t care about deadlifting a lot of weight then there’s not much deadlifts do that can’t be replaced with other exercises, besides what dogma might tell you. I’d suggest figuring out why you hate them first and seeing if you can remedy the issue, but don’t let it ruin your enjoyment of training if it’s that bad. You can still get jacked and strong without deadlifts, you just won’t be particularly good at deadlifts.