Are you curious about the Eddie Hall deadlift workout?

Eddie Hall is one of the strongest men in the world. He famously won the World’s Strongest Man competition in 2017, and he has gone on to become an internet celebrity.

However, many people remember Eddie Hall for being the first man to deadlift over 1,100 pounds!

So what does Eddie Hall’s deadlift workout look like?

Eddie Hall trains the deadlift one day per week on his upper back focused workout. He starts the workout with heavy deadlifts for sets of 1-5 reps or speed deadlifts for multiple sets of 2 reps. Then he performs different accessory exercises for his upper back.

Here is Eddie Hall demonstrating how he likes to organize his upper back workouts:

• Eddie Hall Back Workout

Eddie Hall performs deadlifts first in his workout, followed by different accessory exercises for his upper back including lat pulldowns and seated cable rows.

The Eddie Hall Deadlift Program

So what did Eddie Hall’s weekly training split look like?

When Eddie Hall was competing as a professional strongman, he trained 4 days per week using something resembling a 4 days per week upper / lower split.

This is probably most popular training split amongst elite-level powerlifting and strongman competitors.

And there is a very good reason for this: the 4 days per week upper / lower split is practically unbeatable for all-out strength gains!

Eddie’s weekly training split looked like this:

The Eddie Hall Training Split

• Day 1: Legs
• Day 2: Chest
• Day 3: Off
• Day 4: Back
• Day 5: Shoulders
• Day 6: Off
• Day 7: Off

One of the biggest questions that a strongman competitor has to answer is when he will train the strongman events.

The strongman events, including the super yolk, farmer’s walk, log press, and atlas stones, are the events that strongman competitors actually compete in.

Guys like Chad Wesley Smith are right-on-the-money when they talk about the importance of training specificity.

That is, if you want to get good at something, you have to train that something!

Here is what Eddie Hall’s weekly training split looks like including all his major exercises and strongman events:

Monday: Legs

• Exercise #1: Squat
• Exercise #2: Leg Press
• Exercise #3: Super Yolk

Tuesday: Chest

• Exercise #1: Bench Press
• Exercise #2: Incline Bench Press
• Exercise #3: Triceps Accessory Exercises

Thursday: Back

• Exercise #1: Deadlift
• Exercise #2: Atlas Stones
• Exercise #3: Farmer’s Walk
• Exercise #4: Back Accessory Work

Friday: Shoulders

• Exercise #1: DB overhead press
• Exercise #2: Log press
• Exercise #3: DB lateral raise

Eddie Hall says that with the weights he was using, his workouts often took 3-4 hours to complete at his peak!

This isn’t a recommendation – most of you reading this will do best to keep your training session limited to 1 hour after warming up.

It’s hard to argue with Eddie’s results though!

Eddie Hall’s 500 Kg Deadlift Cycle!

So what did Eddie Hall’s deadlift training cycle actually look like?

The truth is, Eddie Hall performed a 9-week peaking cycle. Each week he alternated between a “heavy” deadlift workout, and a “speed” deadlift workout. check it out:

The Eddie Hall 500 KG Deadlift Cycle

• Week 1: 65% 3 x 10 (warm up week)
• Week 2: 70% 3 x 8 (heavy week)
• Week 3: 60% 8 x 2 (speed reps week)
• Week 4: 75% 3 x 5 (heavy week)
• Week 5: 60% 8 x 2 (speed reps week)
• Week 6: 80% 3 x 3 (heavy week)
• Week 7: 80% x 1, 85% x 1, 90% x 1 x 3 (heavy week)
• Week 8: deload (no training)
• Week 9: (competition): 85% x 1, 93% x 1, 100% x 1

This is an extremely simple, but effective deadlift peaking cycle.

Eddie Hall’s peaking cycle notes

Eddie Hall used a 9-week peaking cycle to prepare for his record breaking deadlift.

All of the percentages provided here were based off of his estimated 500 kg deadlift at the end of the training cycle.

This means that Eddie’s actual training percentages were significantly higher than what is listed throughout the majority of his training cycle.

It’s important to note that Eddie is deadlifting once per week, but he is NOT deadlifting heavy once per week!

Instead Eddie is deadlifting heavy every other week and performing lighter speed reps on his “off” weeks from heavy deadlifting.

These speed days are very similar in execution to Westside Barbell’s dynamic effort training method.

In Eddie’s own words, deadlifting heavy every week is just too taxing for him to recover from.

By doing speed reps on his off weeks he is still training the neural patterns required to deadlift with good technique and he is still recruiting the fast-twitch muscle fibers.

So these are definitely NOT wasted weeks or “easy.”

A Typical Eddie Hall Deadlift Session

Let’s dive right into what was a typical deadlift session for Eddie Hall during his 500 kg deadlift training cycle.

Here is what Eddie’s exact week 7 deadlift workout looked like:

Sample Eddie Hall Deadlift Workout

• Exercise #1: Deadlift, 3 sets of 1-3 reps**
• Exercise #2: Lat pulldowns, 3 sets of 12 reps
• Exercise #3: Seated cable rows, 3 sets of 12 reps
• Exercise #4: Stiff-legged deadlift, 3 sets of 12 reps

Perform 1 rep at 80%, 1 rep at 85%, and 3 reps at 90%. Rest several minutes in between each set.

Talk about a brutal spinal erector workout!

On his accessory work, Eddie Hall always worked up to one all-out set of about 12 reps per exercise.

Of course, Eddie performed warm-up sets before proceeding with his one main set.

His warm up sets were structured as follows for all 3 accessory exercises:

• Set 1: 60% x 12 (easy)
• Set 2: 80% x 12 (moderately hard)
• Set 3: 100% x 12 (very hard)

Basically Eddie prefers to perform several warm up sets culminating in his one all-out set on his accessory exercises.

This is certainly in line with how many successful lifters have trained over the years such as Dorian Yates.

Eddie Hall’s Secret Deadlift Training Tips

Eddie has one of the strangest deadlift training methods I have ever seen or heard of in my life!

I’m going to just dive right into it: Eddie does NOT pull his deadlifts all the way to lockout in training!

Instead he accelerates the bar to just below his knees before giving up on the pull entirely!

He just lets the bar stop accelerating as it crosses his knees and then it falls back down to the ground.

Once per month (on his heavier day) Eddie trains to full lockout to maintain the proper movement pattern.However, the other 3 deadlift workouts a month he performs these bottom-range deadlifts instead!

Eddie Hall is the only person I have ever heard of or seen doing this.

Eddie’s thought process is that his deadlift is all about speed off the ground.

If he can pull the bar up to his knees with enough speed then he will have no problem pulling the weight all the way to lockout.

On the other hand, if he doesn’t garner enough speed off the ground then he’s done-for anyway.

Effectively he is overloading the bottom-half of the strength curve. This is pracitcally the opposite of what Louie Simmons typically recommends!

Eddie says why train the easiest part of the lift and just dig further into his recovery stores when it probably won’t do him any good?

I recommend you take this advice with a grain of salt.

I probably won’t be recommending Eddie’s bottom-range only deadlifts to my powerlifting or strongman clients anytime soon.

However, I would have a hard time talking someone out of training this way given how well it worked for Eddie.

This may be a case of “bro-science,” but again, how are you going to argue with a 500 kg deadlift?

The answer is you can’t!

Verdict | The Eddie Hall Deadlift Workout!

Eddie Hall’s 500 kilogram deadlift world record was nothing short of a paradigm shift equivalent to Roger Bannister running the first sub 4-minute mile in 1954.

For the longest time scientists thought it was literally physically impossible for any human to run a mile in under 4 minutes.

It couldn’t be done!

It’s a good thing Roger didn’t listen because right after he broke through the barrier an absolute army of runners followed his lead.

As my childhood hero Arnold Schwarzenegger has so famously said:

“Everything is impossible until someone does it.”

Likewise the greatest gift of Eddie Hall’s deadlift performance is the destruction of our limited viewpoints on what humans are capable of achieving.

As I write this Hafthor Bjornsson has already bested Eddie Hall’s record with a 501 kilogram deadlift of his own.

How far can humans push the limits of human physical performance? Is there even a limit?

Heck, why should their be a limit? Can humans continue to push the limits of human performance the way we have lifted and expanded the collective consciousness of mankind over great expanses of time?

I don’t see why not!

One thing is for certain: love him or hate him, Eddie Hall has truly uplifted and expanded the consciousness of mankind through his mind-bending feats of strength.

And for that, all of humanity should salute him.

Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of luck in your strength training endeavors!