reckonerStiff-leg deadlift
A hinge with the knees held close to straight, so the range comes from the hamstrings lengthening rather than from the knees bending out of the way. It is the longest hamstring stretch in the library, and it is the lift people are quickest to add weight to and slowest to earn it on.
Knees almost straight, push the hips back.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Start standing with the bar
Take it out of a rack, or pull it up off the floor once and start from there. Feet about hip width, bar against your thighs, shoulders set back so the bar cannot drift away from your legs.
Straighten the knees and leave them
Not locked hard, not soft. Knees almost straight, push the hips back, which is the cue on your wrist. From here the knee angle should not change at all, and that one decision is what makes this lift the lift it is.
Push the hips back and let the bar run down your legs
The hips travel backwards, the chest comes down because it has to, and the bar stays in contact with your legs the whole way. Back flat, shoulders pulled back, ribs down.
Stop where the hamstrings stop you
The bottom of the rep is a sensation rather than a height. The moment your hamstrings run out of length, that is the rep, whether the bar is at your knees or your shins. With straight knees it will be higher than you expect.
Drive the hips forward to stand
Push the hips back underneath you and finish standing tall. Do not lean back at the top. The rep is over when you are upright, not past it.
What goes wrong
Treating it as a Romanian deadlift with a different name
The two lifts differ by one thing and the difference is real. A Romanian deadlift keeps the knees softly bent and fixed there. This one keeps them close to straight. Put side by side in trained lifters, the Romanian version showed greater semitendinosus excitation and this one greater gluteus maximus excitation1. Two lifts, two records, and room in a program for both.
Chasing the floor
The bar does not have to reach anything. With the knees straight the hamstrings run out early, and every bit of range after that comes from your back rounding. The usual reason given for holding the flat back is that bending the spine under load causes back pain, and the evidence for that is thinner than the confidence it is normally stated with3. The reason to hold it here is simpler. Once your back rounds, the extra range came from your spine and not from your hamstrings, so you have stopped doing this exercise.
Cutting the range to add weight
The stretch is the whole point. Hamstrings trained at a long length grew more than the same muscle trained short: twenty adults ran one leg on a seated leg curl and the other prone for twelve weeks, and the seated leg, where the hamstrings sit longer, gained more muscle2. That was a leg curl rather than a deadlift, so read it as a reason to protect the range here rather than as a measurement of this lift. Shorten the range to move more weight and you have traded away the thing you came for.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 60 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 at 60 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 60 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 60 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to six. You are now working 5 to 8. |
| 5 | 4 x 6 at 62.5 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 6 at 62.5 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Stiff-leg deadlift or Romanian deadlift?
The knee angle is the whole difference. Soft and fixed on the Romanian, close to straight here. That changes where you feel the stretch and, in the study that put them side by side, which muscles were most excited1. They are separate movements in Reckoner and they keep separate records, so run whichever your hamstrings and your lower back get on with.
Should the bar touch the floor between reps?
It can, and that is where the name comes from: the classic version is pulled off the floor each rep with the knees near straight. Reckoner does not ask for it, because with straight knees most people cannot reach the floor without their back rounding, and the flat back is the part that is not negotiable. Start standing, hinge to where your hamstrings stop you, and let the bar reach the floor only if it gets there on its own.
Reckoner is not giving me this. Why?
Lower back and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and this comes out of your plan, along with the barbell Romanian deadlift, the single-leg version and the good morning, which record the same thing.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Coratella, Tornatore, Longo, Esposito and Ce, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022. An electromyographic analysis of Romanian, step-Romanian, and stiff-leg deadlift: implication for resistance training ten competitive bodybuilders measured through the Romanian, step-Romanian and stiff-leg deadlift at eighty per cent of one repetition maximum, with the Romanian showing greater semitendinosus excitation than the stiff-leg version and the stiff-leg version showing greater gluteus maximus excitation than the Romanian, measured as electrical activity during the lift rather than as growth
- Maeo, Huang, Wu, Sakurai, Kusagawa, Sugiyama, Kanehisa and Isaka, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2021. Greater hamstrings muscle hypertrophy but similar damage protection after training at long versus short muscle lengths twenty adults training one leg on a seated leg curl and the other prone twice a week for twelve weeks, with magnetic resonance imaging showing greater whole hamstring volume gains in the seated leg, where the biarticular hamstrings sit at a longer length
- Saraceni, Kent, Ng, Campbell, Straker and O'Sullivan, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2020. To flex or not to flex? Is there a relationship between lumbar spine flexion during lifting and low back pain? A systematic review with meta-analysis a systematic review and meta-analysis finding low-quality evidence that greater lumbar spine flexion during lifting was neither a risk factor for low back pain onset or persistence nor a differentiator of people with and without it, with nine of the eleven included studies reporting no significant difference between groups