Adam C. Stewart
Given that Sumo deadlifts disproportionately reward people who already have great deadlift levers, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a disproportionate number of the best deadlifts are Sumo deadlifts.
This article is a follow-up to an older article on the site: should you do conventional deadlift or Sumo? If you haven’t read it yet, you should at least go through it briefly before reading this article – This article was written assuming that readers already know the information covered in the previous article.
The previous article already deals with the claims that the Sumo deadlift is easier because the range of motion of the barbell is shorter (which is usually irrelevant) and that the hip extension requirements are lower in the Sumo deadlift (they are not). For extra credit, you can also take advantage of our Monster deadlift guide, but there is no need to read it before diving into this article.
In this article, I would just like to address a common point of confusion that has occurred in the years since the original article was published in 2015. Since that time, we have witnessed a rise in the power of absolutely crazy Sumo jumpers.
There are a variety of examples, but here are some of today’s notable Sumo massive crucifers:
Each lifter above is the world deadlift record holder in their weight class at the time of writing. And behind that, there are countless other examples of weightlifters on social media doing massive Sumo deadlifts. So, what’s going on here? And am I still maintaining that the Sumo deadlift is not inherently easier than the traditional deadlift?
I still think that neither the deadlift style is inherently superior nor inherently simpler. I still think (and research still suggests it) that, on average, people can lift about the same amount of weight in Sumo and conventional deadlift. However, I’m also not too surprised that Sumo crucifers are setting more world records. In addition, I expect this trend to continue and we will see a gradually increasing gap between the best conventional deadlifts and the best Sumo deadlifts at the forefront of the sport of powerlifting.
These two positions may seem contradictory at first, but they are not. To explain this, let’s start with the most logical and intuitive starting point: the shapes of statistical distributions.
Two values can be used to describe any Variable that is approximately normally distributed (the power of the cross lever is approximately normally distributed1): the mean and the standard deviation.
The average is the average. In this matter, the average represents the average amount of weight that people can lift with a Sumo or conventional posture.
The standard deviation indicates the distribution of the data. In this matter, the standard deviation indicates the distribution of Sumo and conventional deadlift performance.
What I want to suggest is that the performance of Sumo and conventional deadlift have about the same average (and that each style of deadlift is more suitable for about an equal number of people), but that the performance of Sumo deadlift has a larger standard deviation.
This is what it might look like. In the graph below, the average power is the same for both types of deadlifts (400 pounds), but Sumo deadlifts have a slightly larger standard deviation (80 pounds versus 75 pounds for conventional deadlifts):
Overall, these two distributions seem quite similar (obviously). I don’t think anyone would look at these distributions and have the idea that the Sumo deadlift is inherently easier than the traditional deadlift. Now, however, let’s zoom in on the right side of the graph and look at people lifting over 600 pounds.
From this point of view, Sumo deadlifts seem easier, and it seems that people have higher Sumo deadlifts on average than traditional deadlifts. There are about 45% more people with a 600-pound Sumo deadlift than with a conventional 600-pound deadlift. If we keep moving to the right, 700-pound deadlifts are quite rare for Sumo and conventional deadlifts, but there are about 2.5 times more people with a 700-pound Sumo deadlift than with a conventional 700-pound deadlift. If we kept moving to the right, there would be a 5-fold difference for the 800-pound deadlifts.
