The 3 lifts called "unsafe" by a popular podcast

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've ever been told that the barbell back squat is dangerous, or that the deadlift is gonna wreck your spine, or that a bent over row is just asking for a back injury, and you should swap all of them for other movements or machines. I want you to hear this before you give up the best lifts you potentially have in your arsenal. Today I'm gonna walk you through why the case against these lifts falls apart under its own logic and why for anyone over 40, especially women going through menopause, heavy loading on those exact lifts is one of the best things you can do for your bones. You'll learn the three thinking errors that make a safe lift sound scary, what the actual injury numbers say when you compare lifting to something like running, and the one variable that causes most lifting injuries, and it's almost never the lift itself. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today's episode is based on a listener. I want to give him credit right up front, Tim E. He's a valuable member of our Eat More Lift Heavy program. He came to me a little while back and he said, Hey, Philip, I was listening to another show. And I'm not gonna give credit to this show. We're gonna pick it apart, but I'm not, this is not a call out. This is addressing some serious assumptions in that show. They ran this whole countdown of exercises that they called unsafe. And I get it, social media podcasts, you want to be provocative, you wanna be counterintuitive, you wanna be contrarian. But the problem is when it gets people to change their behavior for no good reason. Number one on that list was the barbell back squat. Number two was a conventional deadlift. And then a little further down the list was the bent over barbell row. And Tim basically said, Hey, can you stress test this, Philip? Because it doesn't sit right with me. I've been doing these lifts, I've been successful, you know, building muscle and strength at these lifts. Millions of people use them every day. We talk about them all the time. And what I want to know is there something to this claim that they are unsafe? Right. And they and the episode was like, you know, the three most unsafe exercises or something like that. And I really love that because that's what I want you to do, what Tim is doing. I don't want you to just accept any claim. I also don't want you to reject it because you don't like it, but just say, hey, what is my skepticism radar telling me? Is the reasoning good here? Does it make sense? Does it pass the sniff test? So, Tim, this one is dedicated to you. Now, I want to be fair here. As always, nuances is important. This is not a hit piece on another show. I'm not gonna name them, as I said. Some of the alternative exercises that they talked about are genuinely perfectly fine. These sounded like two fairly intelligent guys who have a history training. One of them was kind of questioning the main host's list as it went along. So I did appreciate that. That's not the issue. The issue is the reasoning used to condemn the big lifts because it gets repeated. It gets repeated like a game of telephone, and maybe it gets twisted here and there. But you hear it from trainers, from physical therapists on social media, from articles telling men, you know, go ahead and trade your squats for goblet squats. Men, women, whatever, people over 50 because you're old, whatever it is, right? And it's kind of everywhere in the water supply of what you're fed through social media. So we're gonna address that. And then stick around to the end because after we get through all of this, I'm gonna share a study result that should change how really everyone over 40 thinks about lifting, but women in particular. And then a question that you can ask yourself before you decide to swap, say, a barbell lift for a machine, before you give it up, right? So I want to really help you make these decisions for yourself. So here's where we're going today. I'm gonna show you the three logical errors in thinking that run through every argument of, oh, this lift is dangerous. I'm also gonna give you the injury numbers, which I'll say surprise me the first time I dug into them. Um, and I want you to know what that looks like. And then we're gonna talk about why axial loading, which is like a fancy way of saying load that runs down through your spine is specifically a feature, not a bug. Okay.

The strongest case against the big lifts

Philip Pape 4:16

It's a feature, not a bug, especially as we age, and you can actually take advantage of that rather than being scared by it. So let's steel man the case first, uh, because I don't want to, I don't want to knock down a weak version of an argument. I don't think that's helpful to you. But the argument against these lifts usually goes something like this. The back squats put a big compressive load right down through your spine. And that's risky, especially as you age. The deadlift is the one that everybody talks about as well, where you're bent over, you've got a heavy bar, and if your form breaks down a little, you know, you round your back, oh, you're gonna herniate a disc. And then we have the bent over row where you're holding that hinged over position under load while you're also yanking a bar into your torso. So now your lower back is doing a bunch of work. And the recommendation from that is okay, we need to find alternatives, like just the assumption that they're gonna most likely hurt you. Alternatives or use machines, or use a leg press instead of squatting, use a chest supported row. So your lower back is out of it. And look, if you use AI and ask AI these questions, it's probably gonna validate your concerns and suggest these things, especially the way you ask it. So we need to really dig deeper. Or it's gonna say, oh, use a trap bar, or just do RDLs, or just do split squats, take the spine out of the equation, and then you don't you take the risk out of the equation. Now it sounds reasonable, it sounds intuitive, and it tends to be generally wrong. Not because the alternatives are bad. Okay, though some of those are great, though, all those exercises I named, but the logic underneath is built on three specific errors. And then once you learn these, you can't unlearn them. Okay, here

The first error in their argument

Philip Pape 5:56

we go. Let's walk through them. The first thinking error is treating load as a hazard rather than the thing that you seek to help you adapt. Load, the heaviness, right? The weight. This is the big one. And I think it's kind of underneath the rest. It cascades into the rest, let's say. When somebody looks at a heavy squat, and it especially if you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it, let's say, and you see this compression on the spine, and you're like, oh, that seems dangerous. You're looking at the load itself as a threat, right? Something to minimize. Oh, how why would you put all that compression on your spine? Well, the problem with that is that load is the entire reason that the adaptation happens. The compression, the tension, the force running through the bone and the muscle and the tendon, right? That is not like a side effect to be worried about. That is the training signal, the stimulus, the adaptation that the thing that your body then responds to when you sleep, when you eat, et cetera. Your bones get denser because they're loaded. Your muscles grow because they're loaded, you know, through mechanical tension. Your tendons and connected tissue get more resilient because they're loaded. I've even had PTs on the show tell us this themselves. This is a PT. People who are concerned with rehab and coming back from injury saying, look, load and oftentimes heavy load on the exact muscles and joints you're concerned about is often what is needed to recover. So if you take the load away in the name of safety, you've removed the medicine, the prescription, let's say, in John Sullivan's words, the barbell prescription, right? You've made the movement quote unquote safer by doing, making it do less of what it's intended to do. Now, I had Chris Duffin on the show back, I think it was episode 456. And if you don't know him, he's the guy that squatted over a thousand pounds in his 40s for reps. He's a got a biomechanics and engineering brain, absolute legend. And he said something on that episode that stuck with me. He said that we adapt to nearly any movement or stress that's imposed on us. That is what's get getting stronger is, right? And we've heard that, we've heard that description through starting strength and through plenty of good strength coaches and practitioners. That is what getting stronger is. It's your body responding to load. So when you get afraid of a lift, if you're afraid you're hurt, you'll hurt yourself, you stop pushing and you stop adapting. And you may not even pay as much attention to good, say, form as a result, which is the irony of it. And then you actually do not get stronger or more resilient, and the fear itself becomes the problem and manifests in potential further weakness and injury. You've probably heard the phrase, I'd rather have a strong bad back than a weak bad back. And that kind of summarizes it nicely because the strength and the risk and chance of injury, they're two separate things. We want the strength there. So error number one is that, you know, load is not the enemy. Load is the stimulus. And when you take it away to feel safe, you're throwing away the thing that's going to help you. Now you're

What EMG activation really shows about muscle growth

Philip Pape 8:56

just gonna get stuck. Error number two is confusing muscle activation with muscle growth. Now, this one's more technical, but I want you to just stick with me because it's it's all over the place. And I still hear the term activation thrown out a lot where it shouldn't be. So a lot of the content about this exercise is just as good or better than this is based on something called EMG, electromyography. Basically, they stick sensors on your muscles, they measure the electrical activity during an exercise, and they say, look, the chest-supported row lights up the lats just as much as the barbow row. So you might as well do the easier, safer one. Or this machine activates the quads more than the squat does, so it's superior. The problem with that is that is an acute activation signal, acute meaning like localized, the EMG number we're talking about, that electrical signal, it does not reliably predict how much a muscle actually grows over weeks and months. And there's a good body of research on this. There's a really sharp critique from a researcher, his name is Andrew Vygotsky. And the point is basically that activation in a single session and hypertrophy over time are two different things. One does not, does not cleanly forecast the other. So stop paying so much attention to muscle activation. And we have training studies where a heavier load produced more EMG activation, but the actual measured muscle growth came out about the same as a lighter load. So it's not always correlated, is my point. If so, if EMG doesn't track growth, then the argument of this exercise activates the muscle just as much as that is not a valid reason to call, for example, a barbell lift redundant and having no other benefits. You're comparing the wrong thing, apple to oranges, right? Like judging two cars by how loud the engine is instead of how fast they go. It's like a distraction or a red herring, if you will. And then there's a flip side here that favors the barbell lifts. A lot of the recent research points to training muscle in a stretched, lengthened position as a real driver of growth. And what do a full-depth squat and a full deadlift do? They load your muscles at long lengths. They activate many muscles. Uh and there I use the word activate, but they I should say they recruit many muscles. And big compound lifts, by design, give you a ton of benefits in that sense. Now, isn't that interesting? But the very thing that makes them feel harder and makes you maybe want to avoid them is the thing that makes them work. So that's error number two: that activation is not growth and not a reason to switch up your lifts. Now, before I give you the third error, I want to take a pause because we're about to hit the most important one and it connects

How to train the big lifts safely and for a long time

Philip Pape 11:40

directly to something I do every day. So many people think they need a different exercise. And what they actually need is someone to help manage their load and the fatigue and the recovery along with their nutrition so that the big lifts stay productive and you do them safely instead of them turning into a problem. And you then you build the confidence to do them and you gain the benefits from them. Now that's the whole idea behind our Eat More Lift Heavy program, exactly where Tim gave us this question. This is our 26-week coach program where we teach you to eat enough to support your training, to fuel properly. We help you progress any of your lifts that you want to do with proper programming and adjustments and dealing with the recovery and potentially injury. Look, we have a lot of folks that come in and they're like, I'm dealing with this injury or this rehab, or I had a surgery or this or that. You know, not from us, but they they they have it going on and then they want help. And one of the things I like to say is look, if you wait till you're ready and everything is perfectly healed, let's say, and you're over 40, you'll never be ready. We all have some level of pain or injury or something going on. And so you kind of need that guidance. And if you've been nervous about the big lifts or somebody talked you out of them or whatever, that is who this is built for. So you can find information at eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. Now I bring it up right here on purpose because the reason people get talked out of be out of these lifts is our third error. It's our third error. And I want you to really listen up to this blaming the lift for what is actually a programming problem. Okay. Blaming the lift for what is a programming problem. So I see the pattern over and over and over again. Okay, it's just so predictable at this point. Somebody's back starts hurting. Honestly, I've been through this cycle in the past. Your low back starts hurting. They've been squatting and deadlifting. And the conclusion is it's the squat and deadlift are hurting my back, and those lifts are dangerous, or some level of that. But then when we look at what actually happened when you dig in, it often wasn't the movement. It was how the movement was loaded. For example, jumping up in weight too much too soon, or too much volume,

What goes wrong when a lift starts hurting

Philip Pape 13:55

or training through fatigue. And that could be the physical fatigue from a lack of energy, but it could also be because you're not eating enough or you're in a deficit or something like that, where your form starts to degrade set after set and you don't stop, or you get distracted, or you're listening to music when maybe you shouldn't, or you're talking to someone in the gym or scrolling your phone, and an and an. You get all these things are forms of fatigue or distraction. Not enough recovery between heavy sessions. You're going five days a week and balls to the wall, and it's super heavy. Right? These are all programming variables. I didn't even mention the actual form of the lift, right? That's also important too, but maybe overstated versus some of these other things. And those are all dials that you can turn, right? And then when you get hurt and you blame the lift instead of the dial, well, you're never going to fix the root cause. And going back to, I mentioned Chris Stuffin, when he was on the show, he talked about people getting into lifting later in life and they get strong pretty fast, right? Because they're very responsive to the stimulus. And then all of a sudden their back starts hurting. And the reason is your muscles tend to adapt faster than your skeleton does, and even your connective tissue. And so your muscle can handle the load before your bones and disc and connective tissue have caught up, and you can outlift your own structural readiness if you rush it. Again, also why we like to for beginners to be eating and not dieting when they first start, just to kind of be fully supportive of that process. And again, it's not the lift itself, it's not the deadlift. It's the progression being too aggressive for where the person is. Because when we talk about lifting heavy, it's relatively heavy to what you're capable of, not just heavy in general or just trying to lift as much as you can or going up 20 pounds overnight on a lift. So it, you know, if your body is tightening up, you're feeling pain, it's often not because you're squatting, it's because you're squatting like garbage, because you're squatting wrong. The movement itself isn't the problem. It's the way it's being loaded and executed. And granted, there's a lot of fear-mongering, even with that, talking about sheer forces and all of these things that people are not understanding properly. So I don't want you to be scared away. Again, it's not the movement, it's how it's being executed. So again, error number three is when a lift hurts, the culprits almost always load progression, fatigue, recovery, or technique, not the lift itself. Now, I want to connect all of these things. Notice what they all have in common. They all point the finger, these errors, I should say, these errors in thinking, all point the finger at the movement. Like, okay, the movement's dangerous, the movement is redundant, the movement hurt me. And sometimes I hear people say, well, yeah, it's because of technique, not the movement, but nobody can do it right, which is BS. That's total BS because thousands, if not millions, of people do do it right. And there's a lot of tolerance for, you know, having your own, I'll say version of the form that's still within the bounds of correctness and safety. And so it's not the movement, it's the variables around the movement that matters. And guess what? You can control those. And sometimes you need help, sometimes you need coaching, sometimes you need advice, YouTube videos, podcasts, whatever to figure it out because it's a

Barbell training next to running injury rates

Philip Pape 16:58

process, right? Now, let's talk about the numbers. What do the injury numbers say? If these lifts are so dangerous, you would expect the injury data to be pretty ugly, right? You'd expect people who squat and deadlift to be getting hurt left and right all the time, you know, falling over. Oh my God, everybody, you know, my aunt, my cousins, my parents, my my, you know, kids, whoever, all these people lifting are just just getting hurt left and right from their lifting. But they're not. They're not. And it's not even close in the data. When you look at the systematic reviews on injury rates in the barbell strength sports, powerlifting comes in somewhere around one to four injuries per thousand hours of training. Weightlifting, you know, the Olympic lifts, that's in a similar range, roughly two to three per thousand hours. That is really, really low. Now let's compare that to running, which every, well, I'm not gonna say everybody thinks, but a lot of people think of as this like safe, gentle, healthy thing. You should do more of, you know, strap on your shoes, anyone can do it. Well, novice runners get hurt at a rate around 17 or 18 injuries per thousand hours, right? Versus one to four for powerlifting, 17 to 18. Recreational runners, which means they have a little more experience, still seven or eight. So running injures people at something like two to more than 10 times the rate per hour of powerlifting, right? And that's just running. We know soccer is also up there, and that's also due to like contact injury and stuff like that. So, from a framing perspective, when it comes to injury, barbell training, when you do it with reasonable programming for what we just talked about, is one of the lowest injury things you could do with your body. And what matters for the whole argument about unsafe exercises is okay, well, what if what about when people do get hurt lifting? Where is that happening and why? Well, the most common sights are the lower back and the shoulder. Sure, we we all can attest to that. I can personally attest to that. But the mechanism, we see this over and over again, is load and fatigue and technique. The beginner who jumped the weight up too fast, the person grinding through the form that's already broken down because of ego, and they don't want to rack the bar, they're ego lifting. It's almost never, hey, they performed the squat properly, and but because it's a squat, they got injured. No, it's how it's loaded, which is the exact same point as error number three, and we're just tying it to the injury data. Mismanagement of the lift, that is the risk, not the risk, not the lift itself. Now, I care about intellectual honesty. So if you think about the argument from the podcast that I'm addressing, that fatigue degrades your mechanics, that is true. So there's a cascade. When you're deep into a very tiring, fatiguing set, and then your form falls apart, that is a window where injuries can occur. So they're not wrong that there can be danger when it comes to that, but it it happens upstream in the fatigue and the programming that allowed you to get to that point. Does that make sense? That allowed you to get to that point. And it could go beyond that too, to like secondary and tertiary variables like your diet, right? If you're not eating enough or if you're training fasted and you're just wiped out, that just enhances the fatigue. You know, if you're not sleeping enough, that just enhances the fatigue. All right, so why does this matter to you? What do we do about it? We've established that the lifts are not inherently dangerous. Injury data backs us up. And now I want to get on the positive side of things because this is specific to you, especially if you're getting older, you're over 40, you know, you're concerned about the injury

What heavy loading does for your bones after 40

Philip Pape 21:06

and the health and the joint risk. Maybe you're new to this, maybe you've never done this before. And for example, women, you know, reach out to me all the time, going through the perimenopause, postmenopause transition, also have a lot of questions about these things. And I like to be very positive and empowering about this because it's not a negative. You are not hopeless at all. It's quite the opposite. So the compressive load through the spine, that axial loading, the thing that people always talk about as potentially dangerous for your bones. That is the single best evidenced non-drug stimulus we have for building bone density. Or at least preserving bone density, if not building it. There's other things that can also build bone density, like jumping type movements. And this matters enormously right now, at this point in time, because the menopause transition accelerates your bone loss. A meaningful chunk of a woman's lifetime bone loss can happen in those few years around menopause. Right. And I'm not fear-mongering, that's just stating a fact. And we can do something about it. I've talked about the lift more study before, L-A-F-T-M-O-R. And most studies are done on young men in college. This was actually done on post-menopausal women, average age around 65, who already had low bone mass. And they're the same type of population that gets told as they get older, they go to their doctor and they're told, what are you doing lifting weights? What are you doing lifting heavy? You got to protect yourself. Oh, you got to watch out for your bones. So, what they did in the study is they had them do heavy deadlifts, heavy back squats, overhead presses, all around 80 to 85% of their one rep max, twice a week for eight months, and they were supervised. So heavy stuff, okay? The stuff that the internet Like it's gonna break you. No, it's not. And what happened? Well, their bone density in their spine improved by almost three percent. While the comparison group that just did light home exercise, they lost bone. Hip bone improved, strength improved, balance improved, posture got better. What about safety? Out of the whole group, one minor adverse event, it was like a back spasm. That's it. So this is heavy barbell training in 65-year-old women with weak bones. It was effective, safe, and hugely beneficial. And remember that I mentioned they were supervised. Okay. So the women didn't just walk in off the street and they were like, here, load 85% of your max, go for it. They actually spent a month first learning the movements and building up with lighter loads. Exactly what we talk about. That's the whole point. That's progressive overload. It's not just grab the heaviest thing and jump into it. It's you build the skill up over time with completely manageable weights and increase that load, which is the medicine, which is the prescription. As I mentioned correctly, you have to dose it correctly. So when you hear all this stuff about unsafe exercises and you're like, oh, you should do the leg press or the chest supported row and forget the other ones. You may be missing out on that load on your spine and hips that you actually benefit from, especially for your bones, especially for your skeleton. So I wanted to mention that. Now I'm not saying machines are bad, of course not. Okay. We can't, these are not mutually exclusive things. For building muscle size, machines, free weights come out about even. We had uh Lauren Calenzo Semple on here to talk about that. Nothing wrong with machines at all. I use machines all the time. If you like the leg press, use it. It's a great tool. And I'm not saying the alternatives they suggest in the podcast or anybody suggest are quote unquote wrong. There's so many options you have. A trap bar, for example, sure, it does reduce the load on your lower back compared to a straight bar. So if it's a better fit for you, great. Again, you're missing out on other things big time, potentially, maybe not, right? It depends on what your goals are. RDLs, goblet squats, split squats, chest supported rows, they're all legitimate exercises. They're great supplements, they're great substitutes to the mane occasionally, or maybe you work them in on different days other than the mains, for example. And sometimes you have just those in and you don't have the mains for a while. And I'm not saying everybody should barbell squat and deadlift no matter what. If you've got a diagnosed issue, a back problem that really flares up with a movement, a movement doesn't work for you, you don't have the mobility, whatever, you have to individualize. Okay. If you regress on something, you have to build it back. It helps to work with someone. That's just a smart thing to do. And then I'm not saying form and fatigue don't matter. Obviously, they matter enormously. That's the whole point. So the big barbell lifts, in conclusion, are not the hazard. Load is a stimulus, it's not a dangerous thing. Activation is not equivalent to growth. When a lift hurts, look at the programming. All right. That will help you find the root cause. Load progression, fatigue, recovery, technique, that is it. Now, before we wrap up, remember that study result that I promised you about heavy lifting and women over 40 and a question to ask before

The question to ask before you swap a lift

Philip Pape 25:46

you swap a barbell lift for a machine. I'm gonna share that in a second. But if this episode changed how you think about the big lifts, do me a favor and just text it to someone, share it with them, email it to them. You know somebody who is scared of lifting or squatting or deadlifting or who, you know, tells you, oh, isn't that dangerous and just doesn't know. And it's holding them back. Or maybe they think they're too old or too fragile. Text this to them. That is the person who needs to hear it. And it might be the thing that saves their lives. I can't understate that. That is not an under an overstatement. It's gonna keep them strong for decades to come. All right, so here's the number that I want to share with you. Up to 20% of the bone a woman loses in her entire life comes off in the handful of years around menopause. I alluded to this before. It isn't just spread across decades. It's actually concentrated right there in a window that for most women is happening at the same time that everything else is changing. People are telling you to be careful, take it easy, skip the heavy stuff. You might be getting gaslit by all sorts of doctors. You know, you've got the symptoms of menopause, the hot flashes, whatever it is personalized to you, the hormonal fluctuations, the stress in your life. So the timing is pretty tough because this is yet one more thing you might be afraid of or not sure it's gonna help, or thinking it's gonna exacerbate the other issues. And yet the signal for your skeleton, for your bones from heavy lifting is phenomenal. So the next time you're about to swap a barbell lift for a machine to be safe, ask yourself a question. Be honest with yourself. Am I swapping this because the movement genuinely doesn't fit my body? Or because someone told me it was dangerous, or I haven't mastered it yet, right? I haven't, I haven't mastered the things Philip talked about in this episode. There's something else that I need to work on before just giving up the lift. And if it's the second one, then you're not really solving the problem, are you? Right? You're just give kind of giving into fear and not getting the benefit from it. And I just want you to be honest with you. So I want to motivate you to see if you can keep the lift, if it is right for your body, or if the reason isn't that it doesn't fit your body, but for these other reasons, and fix the other stuff. You know, we can help you do that. I've talked about that before. I'm not gonna pitch my stuff again, but get the help if needed. Up and one final little thing

Choosing a gym that lets you lift properly

Philip Pape 28:06

about this is seek out the right gym and equipment as well. Don't settle for what you have. I see a lot of women, for example, come to me and all they have access to is a Smith machine. And then they're trying to squat with a Smith machine. And it's it's really dangerous form they're using because they can't get into the right form given the constraints of the Smith machine. Forget the Smith machine. Go with the free the free weights or other machines. Anyway, um, that's a separate topic. I'm gonna leave it at that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember the barbell isn't the risk, it's a tool and used well. It's one of the best things you can do for your body over 40. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.