Deadlift
Romanian deadlift
Works
Also works
Equipment
How to do it
- Stand holding the bar with a pronated grip at thigh level.
- Keep a slight, fixed bend in your knees throughout the movement.
- Send your hips back, lowering the bar close to your legs.
- Descend until you feel a strong stretch in your hamstrings, without rounding your back.
- Drive your hips forward to return to standing.
- Keep the bar close to your body and your shoulders slightly back.
Common mistakes
- Bending the knees like a conventional deadlift
- Rounding the lower back on the descent
- Letting the bar drift away from the legs
What the evidence says
Sumo and conventional aren't the same lift with a wider stance: sumo activates the quadriceps (vastus medialis and lateralis) and tibialis anterior more, while conventional activates the medial gastrocnemius more.
Escamilla RF, Francisco AC, Kayes AV, Speer KP, Moorman CT 3rd. «An electromyographic analysis of sumo and conventional style deadlifts». Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2002;34(4):682-688. View the study
With a hexagonal (trap) bar you lift more weight at higher velocity and power, with lower moments at the lumbar spine, hip and ankle but a higher moment at the knee: it's the pick when you want to load the legs without loading the back as much.
Swinton PA, Stewart A, Agouris I, Keogh JW, Lloyd R. «A biomechanical analysis of straight and hexagonal barbell deadlifts using submaximal loads». Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011;25(7):2000-2009. View the study
The stiff-leg deadlift doesn't cover the whole hamstring: over 9 weeks it grew the semimembranosus (11%) but barely the semitendinosus, which did grow (24%) with the Nordic curl. If you only hip-hinge, you're missing knee-flexion work.
Morin T, Doguet V, Nordez A, Caillet A, Lacourpaille L. «Minimal Role of Hamstring Hypertrophy in Strength Transfer Between Nordic Hamstring and Stiff-Leg Deadlift: A Blinded Randomized Controlled Trial». Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2025;39(9):924-932. View the study
What isn't settled: There is no study that trains one group with sumo and another with conventional for weeks and compares the muscle and strength gained. Everything we know about that comparison comes from single-rep lab measurements: pick the one you can load and hold well, not because a winner has been measured.
Other variations
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