30 Mar Do Heavy Squats and Deadlifts Make Your Waist Larger?

By Tucker Loken

The myth

I’ve heard a lot of male and female competitors ask me this over the years: “will heavy squats and deadlifts make my waist big and thick?” They are afraid to get under a barbell and do squats with any significant amount of weight, and are especially afraid to do deadlifts because they think it will throw off their lines and make them look blocky.

[wa-wps]

The Reasoning

Because it takes a lot of core strength to move big weight in the squats and deadlifts, low reps and heavy weight will stimulate the muscles in the core and waist and cause them to hypertrophy beyond what a normal competitor would want. If you look at powerlifters, you can see they all have big thick waists and it’s all from doing heavy squatting and deadlifting.

The Rebuttal

First – Is it the chicken or the egg? Noticing that powerlifters tend to have wide waists and are also very strong is just seeing a pattern. Good basketball players tend to be tall, but does that mean that playing basketball makes people grow taller, or is it just that people who are tall tend to have an advantage shooting hoops?… If so, I’ll start practicing free throws right now. If you take that and compare it to weight lifting, you’ll notice all the different body types that are attracted to lifting weights, and that each one gravitates to what they are naturally good at. A naturally lean person with a slim build is most likely going to have a hard time competing with their stocky and thick friend in powerlifting, but they could be very competitive in a physique or bodybuilding competition. The same logic goes for people with the opposite body type. Physique and aesthetics are not going to be where they shine, but if they are naturally robust and strong, then powerlifting would suit them well, just like how a small bone structure with a narrow waist and wide shoulders will help a bodybuilder create the most muscle popping appearance possible.  Thick joints and big bones will help people move heavy weights.

Second – Core muscles aren’t meant to grow like biceps. The core can be stimulated and developed, but the majority of the muscle fibers found in the core are slow twitch muscle fibers. Slow twitch fibers are mainly used for endurance and don’t have the same explosive strength or propensity for growth that fast twitch fibers have. Bodybuilders want to work their muscles and all the fiber types as thoroughly as they can, but someone could do just as many sit ups as they do barbell curls, and their arm muscles would grow much faster than their ab muscles. Often the biggest culprit of waist growth is body weight, rather than a one rep max weight on squats or deadlift, due to the endurance nature of the core muscles. If the abdominal and oblique muscles respond best to endurance based stimulation, rather than maximal weight stimulation, then increasing body weight and forcing your core to support a much greater amount of muscle mass 24 hours a day will do much more for core hypertrophy than picking up heavy weight. This is what we saw in the 2000’s with bodybuilding. The bodybuilders were getting up to over 300 pounds in the off season, and their physique was suffering because of it. Prior to that period bodybuilders were still squatting and deadlifting heavy, they just weren’t getting as big as they do today. The only variable in the situation is the overall bodyweight of the bodybuilders, not the act of doing heavy squats and deadlifts.

Third – The training style isn’t made for growth. Powerlifting isn’t about building big muscles, it’s about lifting big weights. A powerlifter can out squat a bodybuilder of the same bodyweight, and a bodybuilder’s quads will be much more developed and larger than a powerlifter’s. If bodybuilding training is all about size and growth, then why would powerlifting cause growth in a body part more than bodybuilding would? If powerlifting elicits more muscle growth than bodybuilding, bodybuilders been doing something wrong for a long time.

The answer

Squatting and deadlifting won’t blow out someone’s waist and ruin their chances on a bodybuilding stage. There are plenty of bodybuilders gifted with strength who have squatted and deadlifted big numbers that never suffered from any kind of ever expanding waist syndrome. There are also plenty of powerlifters who have been gifted with aesthetic body types who have maintained a trim waist and low bodyfat while practicing heavy squats and deadlifts. Once examined, the reasoning to stay away from squats and deadlifts for bodybuilding, physique, figure and bikini competitors just doesn’t hold up. Everyone should be doing these big exercises because they will recruit the most muscles and lead to building the best physique possible, trim waist and all.

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Tucker Loken

Tucker Loken is a Bodybuilder turned Powerlifter turned Powerbuilder from Eugene, Oregon. He did his first bodybuilding show when he was still in high school, and has been training male and female competitors for shows since 2011. Several years ago he decided to take a step away from his normal routine and learn how to get strong. He worked with Brian for 9 months, added 200 pounds to his raw total and qualified as an Elite lifter in the 220 pound weight class. He returned back to bodybuilding much stronger and now incorporates the 10/20/Life philosophy into his training to keep himself healthy and making continual progress in the Big 3 as well as adding size and shaping his physique. Now part of Team PRS, he brings his unique expertise of nutritional knowledge and how to balance Bodybuilding with Powerlifting to help athletes achieve their best potential.

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