Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’ve been running a novice program for several months now, progressing the loads session to session. Your squat started to slow down so you introduced a light squat day to your training week and things are moving along steadily. Your bench and overhead press are still progressing thanks to the use of your nifty fractional plates. But your deadlift set of 5, which you’ve been alternating every other workout with power cleans or Pendlay Rows, seems to have come to a screeching halt.

A conventional novice program might have you further decrease the frequency of your deadlifts, alternating with lighter posterior chain exercises such as chins, back extensions, or RDLs leading to one heavy set of deadlifts every 7-10 days. This should allow plenty of time for recovery, because after all, you’re sure that the reason you missed your deadlift on Friday is because you weren’t fully recovered from deadlifts on Monday. Right? An extra few days of recovery should be the ticket! But when you go to deadlift again, the weight you lifted for three reps last week doesn’t even go up for two. What gives?

What gives is that one heavy set of deadlifts every 7-10 days might be enough to drive progress for a young, athletic trainee who also happens to have a power clean, or Pendlay row, that is considerably heavy. BUT! This is not most people. Most people need more exposure to the deadlift than 1 time per every week-and-a-half, and further, there are many trainees who need, and can tolerate, a higher weekly volume of deadlifts in order to drive progress.

In the example in the opening paragraph, this hypothetical lifter assumed that their deadlift stalled due to lack of recovery. However, lack of recovery is rarely the primary cause of a stall. As a lifter becomes more advanced in their training, moving from a novice, to an advanced novice, to an intermediate lifter, more stress is necessary in order to cause an adaptation. Take for example the formation of a callus. If you apply just enough stress to the skin, in the form of friction, it thickens in response. Apply too much and the skin will tear or a blister will form. But what happens to your existing calluses if you stop applying stress regularly? The skin thins back out and the next time you lift, your skin is markedly irritated, it’s unable to withstand the stress from the bar and it hurts, tears, or a blister forms. Both are an example of an inappropriate amount of stress if you want to maintain a callus.

Another variable to consider for our hypothetical lifter is the weight of their power clean or row. For a trainee who can deadlift 405 lbs. for a set of 5, and power clean or row 225 lbs. for sets across, there will likely be sufficient stress to drive progress on the deadlift. For a lifter who deadlifts 185lbs. and power cleans 85 lbs. or rows 75 lbs., this isn’t be the case. Training the display of power has useful and meaningful implications for many athletes, so we aren’t suggesting you throw in the towel on power cleans just because they are technically too challenging or less than 50% of your deadlift, but after the novice phase, you may want to reconsider the exercise you choose for your lighter deadlift workouts depending on your goals.

Below we provide a 3-phase deadlift program for the trainee who has stopped seeing progress on their deadlift based on the scenario considered earlier in this article. This program is designed to reduce or eliminate training failures, prevent resets, and keep you getting stronger without any setbacks. The PRS transitional deadlift program is written in consideration of a traditional 3-day novice training program with a 3-lift format per session that begins with the back squat, moves on to the bench press or overhead press, and concludes with a deadlift variant.

The following flow chart shows how to progress your deadlift using a starting rep scheme of either 1 set of 5 or 3 sets of 5 across. Some trainees will alternate with power cleans as shown here, but others who are not appropriate or able to do power cleans may use Pendlay rows for 3 sets of 5 across or the Romanian deadlift for 3 sets of 8 across.