The take home message of the deadlift safety studies is: deadlifts are okay as long you dont round your lumbar spine a lot, when you reach full lumbar flexion there is a lot of chance of hurting yourself, but if you use good form it should be alright(this applies only for healthy, not injuried individuals).
[quote]evansmi wrote:
There is no sport that doesn’t involve some risk of injury. People get hurt playing golf, that doesn’t make golf dangerous.[/quote]
That’s true about sports. People getting hurt DOES equal risk. People getting hurt does NOT equal safety.
Keep some perspective here. I’m NOT saying “Don’t deadlift” any more than I would say “Don’t exceed the speed limit.” I’m not a fan of trying to avoid miniscule risks.
The OP asked for any studies that indicate deadlifting is SAFE. Well, I have been studying risk factors for back injuries for several years, and I have looked at the literature fairly extensively. And what I have found is more that deadlifting increases risk of back injury - not decreases it.
Well, I am trained and qualified in design and analysis of studies, and I have actually LOOKED at the study. There are no “confounding variables” in this study by Stuart McGill, who absolutely, positively knows what he is doing when he conducts a study.
Because the injury was actually observed and measured WHILE IT HAPPENED (a rare occurrence) and all the relevant muscle activity was measured WHILE the injury occurred, conclusions can be drawn about causation. If I punch somebody in the nose, and his nose starts gushing blood, I can’t say, “Well, sometimes noses bleed spontaneously; you can’t be sure the punch caused the bleed here.” It’s a ridiculously farfetched conclusion.
And logical conclusions CAN be drawn from one individual. The conclusions are these: 1) it is POSSIBLE for a skilled, experienced powerlifter to injure a disc while deadlifting. (It is indisputable, because of the concurrent observation and measurement, that the deadlift caused the injury.) 2) Experience and technique are not 100% bulletproof protections from injury. Motor control errors can happen. 3) Inadequate firing of one little spinal stabilizer muscle can allow forces great enough to injure a disc.
Because this was one subject, the study can’t conclude anything about the exact probability of injury in the whole deadlifting population. In other words, it can’t predict the probability that the same thing will happen to another deadlifter. (Other population studies, though, show that frequent lifting of heavy loads increases the risk of back injuries.)
The only way that this observation is NOT relevant to other deadlifters is if the guy in the study has some unknown quality that makes him different from every other deadlifter out there.
Look, most who come to this site probably love some form of weightlifting. And weightlifting DOES indisputably have lots of benefits. But loving it and enjoying the benefits does not make it objectively, factually SAFE. In fact, just casually observing the frequency of injury-related threads around here should make it obvious that lifting isn’t safe, and it’s not protecting people from injuries!
You have to look at the severity of the risk as well. Spraining a muscle or pulling a ligament might be a minor few weeks or months of rehab, but a severe back injury can affect you for years or even forever.
Lifting has benefits and it also has risks. My view is that anyone who wants to lift throughout their entire life should right from the beginning learn how to lift as safely as possible to limit the risks and maximize the benefits. That may even mean certain body types limiting exposure to certain lifts. It really doesn’t matter how great lifting is if you can’t do it any more because of messed-up joints.
People with other risk factors for, say, back injuries, should choose their exercises carefully to reduce their lifetime risk of severe injuries. For example, a tall, skinny guy with long limbs, narrow joints, and excessive curves of the spine should either avoid DL or should get great coaching to learn perfect technique, and immediately deal with any pain caused by lifting.
andersons, i mostly agree with your points, everything has some risk, it´s all about risk-to-benefit ratio…
Maybe you had acess to a lot of studies about lower back injury, that i didn´t, but from what i have read, the deadlift with good form doesnt seem to bring a high risk (comparing to other exercises),
plus many specialists point that low lifting capacity is related with incidence of low back injuries, so its very possible that practicing the deadlift can decrease lower back problems incidence. Of course when it comes to higher levels of performance(say over 3x bw, for example) it can be a different story…
And when you read McGill stuff (see Biomechanics of low back injuries), you realize that high volume can be more problematic than high intensity when it comes to lower back injuries.
Mcgill states in his book that the endurance of the erectors is a much better predictor against injury than low back strength is.
Lets talk using deadlifts to rehab. I say this.
First the individual has to be working on hamstring and glute flexibility very consistently. Second look a the deadlift itself. The most difficult portion of the deadlift from a back standpoint is the first fifth off the floor. Rack pulls are designed to work the lower back and glute portion of the lift. If you set up pins at a fairly low height, below the knee, but at a point where the individual can easily keep his or her arch you should be ok. Another topic is weight. So what if that powerlifter wasnt lifting max weight. In a rehab setting I would consider 135 way too heavy, even for someone who could a short time ago, pulled over 700.
I have a client now that has a bulging disc and I am doing high rep deadlifts with him. We started with a 20lb bar and are now using a 45lb bar. There will get a certain point where I will not go heavier, at least for awhile, maybe 65, I am not sure. So in using the deadlift as a lower back endurance exercise we will see how it goes. You can just feel his spinal erectors and see how ridiculously atrophied they are. I know I am playing with fire to a certain extent but I believe it can be done pretty safely, and the longer we go without a problem the stronger his back and the less our chances of another injury are.
[quote]Sagat wrote:
<<<plus many specialists point that low lifting capacity is related with incidence of low back injuries, so its very possible that practicing the deadlift can decrease lower back problems incidence. Of course when it comes to higher levels of performance(say over 3x bw, for example) it can be a different story…[/quote]
I wonder how predictive the relationship is. For example, AFTER my back injury my lifting capacity went to zero.
It’s true about the higher loads. The relationship between injury risk and activity level is U-shaped. The sedentary (sitting all the time) population has a higher risk; the moderately active population has the lowest risk; and the population that frequently lifts heavy loads has higher risk. I considered myself BOTH sedentary and high loading, contrary as that might seem, because I would lift as heavy loads as I could in a 6 AM workout and then go sit on my butt in front of a computer for 12 hours.
Since I don’t know of any studies showing the deadlift to be safe, the next-best indicator IMO would be how injury-conscious strength coaches like Mike Boyle and Eric Cressey program the lift for their own clients.
[quote]Shadowzz4 wrote:
Mcgill states in his book that the endurance of the erectors is a much better predictor against injury than low back strength is. [/quote]
So would using things like high rep stiff leg deadlifts after heavy training be beneficial for injury prevention then? Also, does loading matter, for example should one be keeping some reps in the bag if he’s doing a set of 15?
[quote]evansmi wrote:
andersons wrote:
Because he was hooked up to all the muscle measuring equipment at the time, it was identified that one little muscle failed to fire.
Speaking of confounding variables, I wonder what effect having a bunch of equipment hooked up to him had on his ability to concentrate. What effect could the electromagnetic feild coming of the wire pressed against the skin could have on a tiny little muscle, being that muscles fire off of electrical impulses. Could any of the wires tugged a little, throwing off the lifters balance.
The point is there are a million possibilities, which is why one individual proves nothing.
[/quote]
Good point. The nerves are electro-chemical in nature after all and have a voltage potential across them.
[quote]andersons wrote:
Since I don’t know of any studies showing the deadlift to be safe, the next-best indicator IMO would be how injury-conscious strength coaches like Mike Boyle and Eric Cressey program the lift for their own clients. [/quote]
Don’t know of any studies showing the deadlift to be safe? Look my previous post that you have 4…
On your previous point on the motor control error (in the powerlifter case), McGill says that motor control errors can lead to injury when lifting a heavy load or bending over to pick a pencil… And i dont believe that he would say that if a pencil falls on the floor you should buy another one because picking it on the floor is too risky…
Seriously, the Cosgrove’s book New Rules of lifting discusses it, and although its not “scientific” i believe most here would be convinced.