Everyone wants to increase the amount of iron they can lift in the gym.

We have all been told repeatedly that deadlifts are among the best lifts you can do because they engage various different muscle groups, from your legs to your core, to your back and elsewhere — but lifting excessive weights such as this can be hugely troublesome to your joins and back if you are not using the correct methods.

Robert Oberst is a strongman who can deadlift in the region of 400kg but, as he said on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, he isn’t particularly fond of the deadlifting bug which has taken over many modern gyms.

“It’s so hard to be a great deadlifter and to not risk your lower back and to be using your upper back properly. There’s so many chances for you to get hurt,” he said to Rogan via Men’s Health.

Oberst came from an an American Football background and says that deadlifts are almost never done in training because of the large injury risks which come along with them, instead focusing on hang cleans and power cleans.

“If you go into any NFL gym or any Division One college football gym or any into [any field of] athletics where people are getting paid and it matters what they’re doing, they’re not deadlifting, they’re hang cleaning and power cleaning.”

Deadlifting, Oberst says, is not the type of exercise that should be attempted be regular gym-goers.

“The risk to reward ratio is a joke,” said Oberst, “and a lot of people aren’t going to like that I’m saying that.”