Romanian Deadlift

How to do the romanian deadlift

1. 01Stand holding the bar at the top of a deadlift, feet hip-width, knees softly bent — not locked, not squatting.
2. 02Set your back before you move: chest tall, shoulder blades down, a small natural arch in the lower back.
3. 03Push your hips straight back and let the bar slide down your thighs. The bar stays in contact with your legs the whole way.
4. 04Stop when your hamstrings will not let you go further without your lower back rounding. For most people that is mid-shin, not the floor.
5. 05Drive your hips forward to stand, squeezing the glutes at the top without leaning back.

Coaching cues

• Push the hips back at the wall behind you, do not bend down at the waist.
• Drag the bar down your legs. If it drifts forward even an inch, your lower back is taking the load.
• Knees soft and fixed. If they keep bending on the way down you are squatting the weight.

Common mistakes

FaultRounding the lower back at the bottom

FixYou went past your hamstring range. Stop where the arch disappears — that point is the rep, regardless of how far the bar got.

FaultBar drifts away from the legs

FixEvery inch forward increases the lever on your spine. Actively pull the bar into your thighs as you descend.

FaultTurning it into a squat

FixThe knee angle is set at the start and does not change. If your hips drop, you stopped hinging.

FaultHyperextending at the top

FixFinish standing tall with ribs down. Leaning back loads the lumbar spine and adds nothing.

The Romanian deadlift is the best hamstring builder most people do badly. It looks like a deadlift with straighter legs, and that description is exactly what sends the load into the wrong place.

It is a hinge, not a bend

The movement is your hips travelling backwards. Your torso lowers as a consequence of that, not as the goal.

Stand a foot in front of a wall and push your hips back until they touch it. That is the movement. Now hold a bar and do the same thing — the bar goes down because your torso tipped, not because you decided to reach for the floor.

If you initiate by leaning forward, your hips stay put, your spine does the travelling, and the hamstrings never get loaded properly.

Depth is set by your hamstrings

There is no correct bar height at the bottom. There is only the point where your hamstrings run out of length and your pelvis starts to tuck under, taking your lower back into flexion with it.

For a tall lifter with average flexibility that might be just below the knee. For someone very mobile it might be mid-shin. Chasing the floor because that is where the plates would be on a deadlift is how people convert a hamstring exercise into a lumbar one.

Film yourself from the side once. The frame where your lower back stops being flat is your depth.

Keep the bar on your legs

The bar should be in contact with your thighs from start to finish, sliding down as you descend.

This is not a style preference. The distance between the bar and your hips is the lever arm your lower back has to resist. An inch of forward drift is a measurable increase in spinal load at no benefit to the hamstrings.

If the bar keeps drifting, you are probably letting your shoulders round forward. Pull the shoulder blades down and think about dragging the bar toward you.

Loading it

Because range is limited by mobility rather than by strength, the RDL responds well to moderate loads and higher reps — sets of eight to twelve at somewhere around half to two-thirds of your deadlift.

Tempo helps more here than weight does. Three seconds down, feeling the hamstrings lengthen under tension, then a controlled drive back up. That is where the growth comes from, and it is why adding plates to a rushed RDL rarely produces more hamstring.