reckonerSumo deadlift
A wide stance with the hands inside the knees. The bar travels a shorter distance than it does on a conventional pull and more of the work goes to the quads and to holding your hips open, which makes it a different lift rather than an easier one.
Flat back, knees out over the toes.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Glutes, quads, hamstrings, adductors, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, hip, knee, neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set a wide stance and turn the toes out
Feet well outside your shoulders, toes turned out far enough that your knees can track over them. Shins close to vertical when you are down. Wider is not automatically better: go as wide as you can still push your knees out at.
Take the grip inside your knees
Hinge down and grip the bar about shoulder width, arms hanging inside your legs. Bar over the middle of the foot, as close to you as it goes.
Push the knees out and drop the hips
Open the hips by driving the knees out over the toes, and let the hips come down as they do. Chest up. If the knees fall in here they will fall in under load.
Take the slack out, then push the floor apart
Pull up against the bar until it is tight, then drive the feet down and out as if you were spreading the floor. That is what keeps the knees where you put them.
Stand tall and lower it
Finish by standing up, not by leaning back. Then push the hips back and set the bar down. Reset the stance for the next rep rather than pulling from wherever you landed.
What goes wrong
Letting the knees collapse inward
The moment the knees fall in, the stance stops doing the job you picked it for and the lift gets longer and heavier. Push them out on the way down as well as on the way up, and if you cannot, the stance is wider than your hips currently allow.
Going as wide as the strongest person in the room
Stance width is a fact about your hips, not a technique to copy. Somebody else's stance with your hips produces a setup you cannot brace in, and you will feel it as a back that rounds the instant the bar moves.
Treating it as the easy deadlift
Twenty-four competitive powerlifters were filmed pulling both styles in national competition. Hip extensor demand at the floor was similar between them, and what differed was the ankle and the knee1. The bar does travel a shorter distance on a sumo pull, which is a real mechanical difference and not a verdict on who is working harder.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 100 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 100 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 100 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 100 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 100 kg | Load up 100 kg → 105 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 105 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 105 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 5 at 105 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. 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
Is sumo cheating?
There is no measurement that makes it one. Hip extensor demand at the point the bar leaves the floor was not different between the two styles in competitive powerlifters1. Where the rest of the work goes does differ: sumo asks more of the knee and of holding the hip steady across the body, conventional asks more of the hamstring and the upper back2. Two lifts, two demands.
Which of the two should I be pulling?
The one you can set up in with a flat back and your knees out over your toes. If you cannot get there at a wide stance, that is your hips telling you something rather than a technique fault to grind at. Pull the conventional or the trap bar version and come back to this one later.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Declare a hip restriction in setup and this movement comes out of your plan. The library also holds it back for a lower back, a knee or a neck restriction.
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
- Escamilla and colleagues, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2000. A three-dimensional biomechanical analysis of sumo and conventional style deadlifts twenty-four competitive powerlifters filmed in national competition, hip extensor demand similar between the two styles while ankle and knee moments differed and the conventional pull moved the bar the greater distance. Flagged as older than five years and kept because it is the competition-floor measurement no later work replaces
- Hanen and colleagues, Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2025. Biomechanical analysis of conventional and sumo deadlift thirty experienced male lifters pulling both styles at 85 per cent of one repetition maximum, the conventional pull producing higher hip extension moments and greater biceps femoris and thoracic erector spinae activity, the sumo pull greater knee extension and knee abduction moments and more vastus lateralis activity