I think I'm pretty close to 100 right on this and I do think a lot of people are just straight up wrong hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization and today's video is about the stiff legged deadlift versus the Romanian deadlift and the fact that this is an illusory dichotomy in fact these are basically no they are the same thing controversial I know and I know because there are tons of other influencers most of them very very sharp and making great videos that have made entire videos talking about what the difference is between an sldl and an RDL a stiff-legged deadlift and a Romanian deadlift and what I'm going to tell you is going to be potentially controversial but I think I'm pretty close to 100 right on this and don't worry I'll support it even with sources that actually it's the same thing weird and I do think a lot of people are just straight up wrong with all due respect I've been wrong many times in my life here we go maybe this is one of them let's find out what is an RDL I think it's a an SL deal sldl stiff leg and deadlift and it is an SL deal as described to the attendees of a weightlifting seminar in San Francisco in 1990 by the Romanian lifter NICU Vlad and his coach durgamir kiraslan that's my best pronunciation of that I am not Romanian but close close man Romanians have the sweetest names I would pay good money to have my name that's fucking awesome you know that guy's on your way class you're fucking losing in any case this Romanian deadlift was actually named by U.S Olympic coach at the time Jim Schmitz as the Romanian deadlift because he asked during training uh these folks were uh Nico was doing the stuff like a deadlift and they asked him hey what is that movement what do you call that and they didn't really know they said uh deadlift it is a deadlift and they couldn't really explain it so so Romanian deadlift and so Jim Schmitz named it right there how do I know this it is well described by Jim Schmitz himself in the iron mind article that is linked right over here maybe Scott will drop this link in the description as well but you can just look at it it's written up and just Google it it comes up really quick by the way for serious strength athletes iron mind magazine is the fucking bee's knees it is unbelievable I used to read it literally 20 years ago and it was just great is great amazing can't recommend it uh more than I already have now how did Jim Schmitz himself and this is directly from Iron mind directly his quote uh describe the lift okay he said and I'll just read so forgive me for not looking at the camera you grab the bar with your clean grip pull the bar to the tops of your thighs but don't complete the lift that is don't lock out your back the knees are not locked out the chest is out the back is flat and then lower sorry you then lower the bar to about two inches from the platform keeping your back perfectly flat or arched and your knees slightly flexed then you return to the almost erect position have been almost erect a few times that's me not him saying that but it is a very critical here not to fully lock the knees then repeat two very important details are number one your back stays flat or arched at all times and two your knees stay slightly flexed at all times this lift is almost all low back glutes and hamstrings now color me fucking completely crazy but that is the stiff-legged deadlift that lots of lifters have been doing around the world for decades even at that time in 1990. no well let's find out again here is Jim Schmitz quote an interesting side note here is that yoshinobu Miyaki Japan's 1964 and 1968 Olympic champion in weightlifting was at the clinic where the Romanians were and he said he did the same exercise back in his prime in the 1960s I let that sink in I'm calling them Japanese deadlifts from now on weird in addition to this my PhD chair Dr Mike Stone who's one of America's best ever Sports scientists wasn't is used to say very angrily I might add when you called it an RDL in front of him we used to do stiff-legged deadlifts before the Romanians visited they did not invent that exercise they did it like many many other people around the world had for decades now let's get into the weeds of the refined technique technically speaking the RDL is a variation of the stiff-legged deadlift it is a type of stiff-legged deadlift which is a broader category of potential ways of doing that exercise but it's actually the most common way of doing that exercise and it is probably in most cases the most proper technique the stiff-legged deadlift is designed to hit mostly the hamstrings and RDL style which Jim Smith's just described for us is exactly almost exactly how most people would do it it's nearly ideal now I just said that the RDL is one type of a universe of stiff-legged deadlift it's a spectrum of ways you could do that exercise and so some of the stuff that was said in the way to do it like stopping a few inches from the ground we could critique and say aren't there different ways of doing that yes and here they are first all stifling and deadlifts can vary on the degree of back arch you can be ultra super arch in your lower back or you can be even very rounded number two they can vary in the degree of knee band you can have a significant amount of knee Bend or you can do technically speaking a stiff-legged deadlift with completely straight knees and everything in between number three the degree of bar and hip travel you can keep your hips relatively stationary and let the bar swing out really far you can try to keep your hips stationary this is very challenging and keep the bar super tight to your legs you can try to push your hips back really far as you descend and have the bar travel very far away from you as well or most commonly you have your hips travel really far back and the bar stays very close to your hips and the rest of your body number four depth differences you can finish a stiff legged deadlift at the bottom at just around or below the knees or generally if you're very flexible you can do them all the way to below the floor which means you're standing on a platform or lifting with smaller weights and those are deficit stiff-legged deadlifts number five is the grip you could have a narrow grip or a wide grip or even a snatch grip these are all variations on a theme of the stiff-legged deadlift and the RDL is one subtype of the stiff-legged deadlift more generally okay now there are a few other more minor distinctions and I'm sure I haven't even covered all of them but here are some other things to think about one is the degree of eccentric control you'll notice that rdls you descend relatively slowly hypothetically you could do a stiff leg and then left to redescent more quickly retracted versus rounded shoulders you could have a stiff leg of that of where the shoulders just hang you could have ones where you Arch and pull back your scapulae the entire time you can choose to pause in the bottom position or not to pause you can touch the ground or not touch the ground and about a million other smaller changes you could make now because in my humble view probably the best use of stiff-legged deadlifts is hamstring training let's review what the best practices are for using stiff-legged deadlifts to train your hamstrings how would we change these variables we just talked about that could be different between different approaches to the stiff-legged deadlift to actually train our hamstrings the best well here it is first you'll see by the way many of these most almost all overlap with how an RDL is described first you want to have anterior pelvic tilt which means that you have a neutral back or an arched back your hips are tilted up and back that pre-stretches the hamstrings allowing them to get into a more favorable position to be stimulated for growth two you have a slight knee bend it means you're not going to be really uncomfortable with no knee Bend at all and you can produce a high a loading situation for the hams without concerns for safety so it's really good you don't want too much of a knee Bend because then you just have to move the bar a lot further to get the hamstrings actually stretched out number three you want a slow descent to maximize that nasty eccentric hamstring stimulus and to stay safe the hamstrings are a finicky muscle any of you guys have ever played Sports know the hamstrings like to get injured every now and again and those are really almost always really nasty injuries you don't want uh they're pulls they're this they're that you want to go nice and slow because you lose nothing going slow and you gain an extra margin of safety and even probably a bit of stimulus as well another advantage to going slow on the stuff like a deadlift is your knees and hips tend to go off track because they counteract each other if you go slow you can always reinforce that you're still using your hamstrings and they're being pulled apart painfully if you go quickly you could do a thing where you do a wrap you come back up and you're like fuck I bet my knees too much but if you're going slowly you can auto adjust make micro adjustments pushing your knees back keeping it Forward back and forth to keep the right amount of tension on your hamstrings number four you wanted to send deep enough to painfully stretch the hamstrings which is where that advice for stop two inches above probably isn't the best advice in the world from the RDL proponents because if you're really flexible in hamstring stopping two inches above the ground can be just not enough of a stretch and you don't get really sore or make a ton of progress but if you're in that case you would want to do some deficit work and really go below the floor so to speak but if you have very poor flexibility in the hamstrings then you would have to round your back a shitload in order to get two inches above the ground once you round your back your posterior uh your pelvis tilts into posterior tilt it takes tension off of the hamstrings and then it's just not much of a hamstring exercise anymore so really what you need to do is the height where you go to is the most Auto regulated part of the stiff-legged deadlift and you go until you feel a deep painful stretch on the hamstrings not much further than that and definitely don't stop until you feel that deep painful stretch let me tell you guys about the RP hypertrophy app with over 28 preset programs already in the app you can choose to make your own you could modify an existing program or you can just run the programs exactly as they were written by me personally this app programs everything for you exercises weights sets reps frequency the whole thing after every single workout on every single week the app adjusts to your unique parameters with every single input we have over 250 exercises in the app with detailed video tutorial links to every single one you never have to be confused about technique or form ever again I'm guessing right now you're pretty interested in the app download the RP hypertrophy app today so to wrap this up if someone asks you do you like sldls or rdls bro what do you think about RDL versus sldl it's tantamount to asking someone do you like fettuccine alfredo or the kind of fettuccine alfredo to make it most Italian restaurants RDL is the common and basically the most effective type of stiff legandella for training hamstrings so it's just kind of damn near the same thing or you could think about it as a stiff legged deadlift is a very large Circle and an RDL is a also large just slightly smaller Circle that is entirely enveloped by that large Circle trying to do a stiff legged deadlift that is also not cataloged as an RDL usually means you're not training the hamstrings anymore and it's just not really clear what it is you're doing you can do very bent knee rounded back stiff-legged deadlift but really if we're putting a fine point in it that's just a fucking deadlift so again RDL and sldo is almost exactly the same thing and in fact the RDL is entirely encompassed by the stiff-legged deadlift category instead of asking do you prefer the RDL or sldl and also a lot of people don't know what these two things mean so they'll just give you wrong answers they think an RDL is this where it's really not this it's much more clear to ask things if you want to know how a person trains and what they do and want to try to copy them a little bit to get some similar results ask them things like this do you like to pause at the bottom of your stiff legged deadlift or rdls I don't care which one to use I'm not a person that gets pissed if you use RDL it's totally fine the Romanians are sweet how much do you like to pause at the bottom or do you like to pause at the bottom how much knee Bend do you prefer very very straight knees or somewhat more bad news how wide do you like your grip to be questions like that questions that answer where on all of those margins do you prefer to do stuff like adults and actually there's no one correct answer because you can use slightly different approaches as new variations snatch grip stuff like a deadlifts conventional grip stiff-legged deadlifts stiff legged deadlift where you push your bat your butt really far back but bend your knees a little more ones in which you basically almost bend your knees not at all but you keep your butt relatively stable those are all totally fine as long as they are doing the job of safely and effectively loading your hamstrings out of stretch that's the exercise feature that we really really want and I think it's one of the reasons why the Romanians didn't like to do the lockout portion is because that top end really just doesn't offer a whole lot of stimulus and if you get almost all the way up to the top you don't have to re-enter anterior pelvic tilt you're already in it you can simply go right back into the movement and it ends up being a loaded partial and those are showing literature to be very effective why are we saying just ask for variations because there is not this contentious battle between sldl and RDL the RDL is just a well executed version of a very common type of stiff-legged deadlift which means most physique folks will do something and should do something that looks like an RDL and if your stuff like a deadlift looks very different than an RDL that Olympic weightlifter is doing there's more of a chance you're doing it wrong than you're just doing something clever that is not encompassed by the RDL category folks I know this is going to have a lot of comments I'll see you in the comments if you like the video please like it if you hate it just like it anyway I want to be your friend please I need I need likes I count all the likes and if I get a thousand likes on a video I buy myself a cookie and I eat it watching the likes go up if you like this kind of nerdy stuff we'll see you in our members area that 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