I have noticed an increasingly common problem in barbell gyms, that I attribute primarily to laziness. Yes, the rack pull exercise is easier to do than the full pull off the floor. Yes, it's easier to get into a good lumbar extension if you don't have to do it at the floor, where several factors fight against the position. Yes, it's a shorter pull from an easier start position, about half the (force x distance) work than the deadlift. Yes, the weight you can use is heavier, and you can feel better about yourself. And yes, there is a good reason advanced lifters use the rack pull after the full deadlift gets heavy enough that it becomes a recovery problem. But probably not for you.

There are only three types of trainees who should be using rack pulls instead of a full range of motion deadlift.

1. Advanced lifters who need a very heavy partial overload movement using a reduced ROM – generally every other week alternated with halting deadlifts for the bottom half of the pull. For these people, the heavier weight contributes to the full movement while not tapping in to recovery resources so far as to interfere with weekly progress.

2. Intermediate lifters who need 2 heavy pulling workouts a week to continue making weekly progress, but who cannot recover from 2 full deadlift workouts. Like advanced lifters, these people need heavy work, but their ability to recover has been compromised by their own ability to lift heavier weights, and a partial movement is appropriate.

3. The frail elderly or otherwise pathology-compromised individuals who cannot safely pull a bar from the floor.

Nobody else has any business making their pulling artificially easier by removing the part of the ROM that they don't like – or that they don't like to coach. There is a legitimate reason for using partials in training, but it always involves either recovery capacity or the actual ability to use a part of the normal human range of motion. When deadlifts get so damned heavy that they adversely affect the rest of your training, rack pulls and halting deadlifts (a partial pull from the floor to just above the knee) can make this manageable while keeping the weights heavy. And if you are a beat-up old guy with injuries that make pulling from the floor a legitimately bad idea, you do what's necessary, and what you can.

The real problem lies with coaches who'd rather not learn how to solve the movement problems involved with new trainees pulling from the floor. Lumbar flexion needs to be corrected, but correcting it by using a position where it's not actually a problem is not a correction. That's like taking an Uber instead of learning how to drive. Everybody can hold lumbar extension with the bar above mid-shin, but jumping your client from deadlifts to rack pulls because the low-back is round off the floor is an abdication of your responsibility to a paying customer. Coaches: if you don't know how to coach the floor pull, either learn or stop charging for your services. You're not being a confrontational asshole when you correctly teach and cue for correct technique and then firmly insist on correct technique – you're being professional, and that's what's expected of a professional barbell coach.

The rack pull can be a useful teaching tool for working a pull down to the bottom in lumbar extension. Start high, set the back, see how it feels, pull it, lower the rack pins a little, set the back, see how it feels, keep it locked, pull it, do it again a little lower – back up and start over if necessary – and so on down to plates touching the floor. But this correction happens in one workout, not as a replacement for the full deadlift as a basic exercise. You're teaching (or learning) how to hold the back in solid extension with the spinal erector muscles and the abs in isometric contraction through the whole range of motion, and how your breathing contributes to this movement pattern. But once it is learned, it must be practiced over the full pull from the floor, or it will never really incorporate into the deadlift.

And for those of you who say that you'll just use rack pulls to get the back strong enough to keep it flat off the floor, we have lighter weights for that. Back up to 135. Bottom line: a correct floor pull with a flat low back is a skill that allows strength to develop in the parts of the musculoskeletal system that generate the position. You can't train the strength without the correct position and neuromuscular control – you can't strengthen the position if you can't hold the position under a load, and if you don't know how to set a flat back with high hips, you have to learn. If you don't know how to pull off the floor correctly, or how to coach it, you're not going to learn either one by avoiding the position.

Deadlifts are hard – that's why we use them in training. They are sensitive to technical errors: they must come off the floor directly over the mid-foot, and the lats must keep them over this balance point all the way to lockout. If you can deadlift 500 correctly, there are not many strength-dependent physical tasks you can't perform. Rack pulls are hard too, but there is a qualitative difference: a 605x5 rack pull is shorter and less technically delicate – you just get in the right position (bar over mid-foot) and keep pulling the damn thing up your legs until the set is finished. However, we don't use rack pulls because they are technically easier, we use them because we can pull heavier weights than we can off the floor without the recovery problems.

But a novice having trouble with lumbar flexion at 185 is not a candidate for what should be a heavy overload exercise for a much more advanced lifter. Avoiding having to solve the movement pattern problem is laziness on somebody's part, and laziness is not productive in the Grand Scheme of Things.

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