by
healthy_blogging
You've been reading my dumbbell deadlift series. You've experienced incredible strength gains by practicing heavy lifting with dumbbells. You've come a long way. Congratulations. But now you know that you've progressed as far as you can with those exercises. You need to ratchet things up in order to continue gaining strength. Now it's time to do barbell romanian deadlifts, this is the big brother of the dumbbell Romanian deadlift. There are a lot of benefits to doing the Romanian deadlift with barbells because it:
- strengthens your back muscles
- strengthens your hamstrings
- strengthens your core
- strengthens your glutes
- strengthens your wrists
- strengthens your grip
- promotes muscle growth
You'll need an Olympic bar and weight plates for this exercise. Do a warm up set first. Foot placement is essential when doing Romanian deadlifts. Place your feet under the bar, the distance between them must be shoulder width apart. Make sure that your toes are pointing forward. The next thing you will do is bend down to grip the bar. Keep your back straight when you do this, any arching could do serious damage to your spinal cord and the muscles in your back. Grip is also important. You can use either the pronated, supinated or alternate grip. Pronated (palms away) is by far the most difficult and awkward of the grip styles and it puts unnecessary strain on your wrists, so I advise against it. Supinated (palms facing you) is much better and is used by many experienced lifters. The alternate grip is useful when grip strength isn't equal i.e. one hand has greater strength than the other. In the demo I use alternate grip to demonstrate how it is used. Grasp the bar in the ridges not the smooth part.
After you've taken hold of the bar, it's time to execute the lift. Take a deep breath. Now use your glutes to push yourself to a fully upright position. Stand up straight, and draw your shoulders back. You'll be calling on muscles in your back, legs and and glutes to help you lift the weight off the floor. Pulling your shoulders back is good for developing upper body strength. Hold for a three second count. Now lower the weight to the floor. That's one rep. Repeat this for ten reps. After your barbell romanian deadlifts warm up set, choose heavier weight plates. If strength is your goal you must lift heavy. That means going for three to six reps per set for a total of five sets. If you can't do that many, then you need to get lighter weight plates. If you only want to tone or build muscle size, you can go for ten or twelve reps per set, but use lighter weights when doing the exercise.
Strength trainers must add more weight every week. Increase the amount by twenty-five to fifty pounds, you want to maintain consistency with the number of reps and sets that you complete. Romanian dead lifts are a compound exercise that produces functional strength. It's an excellent whole body workout that produces strength for benching, pull ups, squats, dips, etc.
Dead lifting is also a great exercise for burning extra fat. Heavy lifting stimulates production of testosterone and other growth hormones which lead to increased size. It also speeds up your metabolism and helps you to burn fat. So if you want to lose the fat pounds in time for summer, you should do deadlifting.
Summer is just a little more than a month away. Do you want to spend it as a flabby out of shape guy who tires easily? or do you want to be strong and active with lots of energy? Since you're reading Great Chest and Whole Body Workouts, you want to become stronger. So get off the computer and start exercising.
(second photo depicts dead lift at 315 pounds which is 74 percent of my 1 RM)
"Great Chest and Whole Body Workouts: How To Do Barbell Romanian Deadlifts" copyright 2011 Great Chest and Whole Body Workouts. All Rights Reserved.
