Technically, if you are terrible at pulling a barbell off the floor, you can be terrible at pulling a trapbar off the floor too. And one could be equally terrible at hinging while doing the eccentric portion of the hinge (RDL).

The tricky part of any hinge is to keep the hamstring and glute loaded as you increase the shear load on the spine. And maintaining an isometric contraction by bracing through the entire movement.

Improving tolerance for this by being more generous with knee flexion and staying more upright might be the way to go. Most folks are far more tolerant of compression load than shear load.


My problem with labelling exercises as risky or even assigning weights to that risk is that it won’t be long before the toolkit shrinks dramatically and we are down to only machine work.

This risk aversion leads to a loss of confidence and aversion to basic movement. While this might sound dramatic, fostering optimistim and confidence towards movement is a big chunk of my job.

Any fear, lack of confidence or aversion is almost always a bad thing except in the rarest of rare cases.