Deadlifts for Mental Health

If you’ve had the misfortune of asking what I’ve been up to lately in recent months, you’ll know that I’ve been lifting a lot. Two or three times a week, I go to a gym, put on workout clothes, pick heavy things up and put them back down again, undress, shower, redress, and then proceed with my day. Most of the gyms I go to happen to have a sauna, so I’ve also been hitting the sauna at least twice a week. I’m not convinced that the sauna is good for physical recovery, but it does feel good, and I often leave feeling more calm and centered (albeit quite a bit more dehydrated) then when I entered. I’m not here to talk about saunas, I’m here to talk about doing deadlifts, and to some degree, squats.

Deadlifts in particular occupy a unique space in the mind of the casual weightlifter. Deadlifts are touted as one of the single best exercises you can do to build whole-body strength. This makes sense; to properly do a deadlift you have to engage most of the muscles in your body. Deadlifts are deceptively simple; pick up a barbell from the ground and put it back down again. To do this in a way such that you don’t hurt yourself requires a decent level of technique¹. I think this is why a lot of people see them as a little scary. Perhaps we heard about our buddy’s uncle’s friend who threw out his back doing a deadlift and hasn’t been able to walk right since the mid 90’s. Deadlifts take on an almost mystical quality in the minds of many weightlifters. I think this has to do with their ability to make you strong and their ability to exhaust (and even hurt) you, but I think it’s because more than any exercise, they represent the grind. Maybe we’ve heard of or even seen the person who deadlifted so hard she got a bloody nose, or pooped her pants. Deadlifts are fucking hard, and moving that bar a meter off the ground requires a concentrated level of effort and attention that I don’t really experience in other parts of my life.

A lot of what I’ve said here can be extended to doing (heavy) barbell squats as well. They are hard, and getting from the bottom of the range of motion back up to the top with 100 kg on my back has proven to be one of the most physically taxing things I’ve ever done.

I’ve come to relish these brief, intense moments of exertion. I rejoice in the those 60 seconds it takes me to grind out 5 reps of deadlifts or squats. I like doing this big compound barbell lifts because they represent a challenge, and I like to do hard things. I also like them because they allow for a form of emotional release. These lifts help create space in my heart for healing. With that healing comes more love for myself, more compassion for my friends, family and colleauges, and less negative, intrusive thoughts.

I have some thoughts on how these lifts have been helping me to heal emotionally. For one, they represent a discrete, tangible accomplishment. After I go to the gym, I show up to work already having dealifted 140kg, or having squatted 100kg. I have nothing to prove, because I’ve already done somthing. Better yet, the thing that I’ve done is just for me. It doesn’t have anything to do with other people, it’s just about me and the barbell. Moreover, making progress is far less ambiguous as compared to other forms of physical exercise. For example, it could be that last week I did a loop of Tempelhofer feld in 15 minutes, and this week I did it in 14:45. But the wind was different, and it was raining last week, and I was drafting off some guy for a little bit, and I sort of cut that corner on the last turn… Meanwhile, last week I deadlifted 135kg, and this week I did 140kg. No qualifications necessary; I simply lifted more weight this week compared to last week.

I think there is a physiological component at play here as well. When doing big compound lifts like the squat or deadlift, you have to recruit lots of different muscle groups and coordinate them to successfully perform the movement. When squatting, I’m thinking about pushing out against the belt with my abs to create intra-abdominal pressure, gripping the ground with my feet, looking down a meter or so ahead of me, and twisting my heals into the ground to better engage my butt muscles all with more than one Dean’s worth of weight on my back². Again, it requires a lot of concentration and a lot of effort, both mental and physical. I know I’m getting into some really wishy-washy stuff here, but I think engaging one’s nervous system in this way taps into something that is profoundly satisfying for people like me. I think this full body and mind engagement squeezes out any other thoughts and feelings; it’s like my psyche has reached capacity. When the lift is over, I’m left with a momentary sense of stillness, even emptyness. Repeated enough, I think this mind-body engagement followed by that moment of stillness have allowed for subtle changes in my mind that feel like healing.