Forgotten Exercises: Paul Anderson’s Upside-Down Deadlift

I went looking for a hole and found Paul Anderson hanging upside down.

The hole belongs to one of the great stories in strength history. Anderson, so the tale goes, wanted to overload his squat beyond what he could manage through a full range of motion. He dug a hole, stood inside it and performed very short squats with a huge weight. As he became stronger, he gradually filled the hole, forcing himself to move the bar through a slightly greater distance.

It sounds entirely plausible. Anderson was famous for partial lifts, homemade equipment and training methods built around whatever problem he was trying to solve. I am still looking, however, for an original source that explains precisely what he did.

During that search, I found something equally strange and much better documented: Paul Anderson’s upside-down deadlift.

Paul Anderson, practical inventor

Paul Anderson was one of the strongest men of the twentieth century. He became world heavyweight weightlifting champion in 1955 and won Olympic gold the . He was renowned for his squatting power and later built a career around exhibitions of extraordinary strength.

He was also an inveterate experimenter.

Anderson’s training world was not organised around rows of standardised machines. He used heavy partials, supports, cables, pulleys, benches and equipment made for a single purpose. His gym was as much a workshop as a training space. When the exercise he wanted did not exist, he built it.

That habit produced the upside-down deadlift.

Anderson’s ‘great discovery’

In his 1970 book, Anderson explained that his legs had responded much more rapidly to weight training than his upper body and lower back. He became convinced that this was caused by blood flow.

The legs, he reasoned, received more blood because gravity pulled it downwards. The upper body did not enjoy the same advantage. As proof, he suggested holding one hand overhead while leaving the other by the side. After a few moments, the raised hand would appear paler.

From this, Anderson made what he called a ‘great discovery’. If the upper body was not receiving enough blood, the solution was to turn the body upside down.

He asked several other weightlifters what they thought. They looked at him, then at one another, and smiled. Anderson did not take this as a warning. He decided they were too attached to the ‘ancient rules of training’ to recognise a new idea.

His first experiments were relatively simple. He held handstands against a wall and performed handstand presses by sliding his feet up and down. He then returned to the bench press and claimed he could immediately lift around twenty per cent more.

That was enough encouragement for him to start building equipment.

What was the upside-down deadlift?

Anderson experimented with several forms of inverted training.

For one method, he attached loops to heavy boots and used a hoist to suspend himself by the ankles. From there, he could hang upside down or lower himself towards two boxes and perform handstand presses.

The upside-down deadlift used a different arrangement. Anderson constructed a steeply inclined bench, which he compared to an ironing board. His feet were secured near the top with webbing belts, and he lay backwards until his head was close to the floor.

A pulley was positioned between his feet. A cable ran from a set of weights, through the pulley and down towards a bar held in his hands. Anderson then performed a pulling movement while strapped to the bench.

It was not a deadlift in the conventional sense. The bar did not leave the floor and Anderson did not finish standing upright. It was his inverted version of a heavy pulling exercise, designed to work the back while the upper body was supposedly full of blood.

The photographs show the arrangement more clearly than any written description could. Anderson lies head-down on the bench with his feet secured, holding a bar attached by cable to weights above him. It looks homemade because it was homemade. The apparatus existed because Anderson had developed a theory and needed some means of testing it.

The pulling routine

The upside-down deadlift was not merely something Anderson tried once for a photograph. He placed it directly inside his regular pulling routine.

His first set paired ten upside-down deadlifts with six conventional deadlifts. He then performed another ten inverted repetitions before four heavier deadlifts. A third set of ten upside-down repetitions was followed by a two-repetition limit attempt.

He applied the same idea to high pulls. Ten inverted pulls came first, followed by six conventional high pulls. He repeated the pairing as the weight increased.

The logic remained consistent throughout. The inverted exercise sent blood towards the back and upper body. The conventional lift followed while those muscles were supposedly enjoying the benefit. Anderson claimed that his bench press and deadlift began to improve rapidly and eventually came closer to matching his already exceptional squatting strength.

Whether the explanation was correct mattered less to Anderson than the result he believed he was getting. He observed, experimented and kept whatever appeared to work.

Could anyone reproduce it?

Technically, yes.

You would need a heavily reinforced inclined bench, secure ankle restraints, a pulley fixed near the feet, a cable and a load positioned so that it could move freely. You would also need complete faith in the bench, the restraints and whoever had assembled the entire thing. This helps explain why the exercise disappeared.

Anderson trained in a culture where lifters regularly adapted or built their own equipment. Exercises were shaped around the individual rather than selected from whatever machines happened to be available. That freedom could produce ingenious solutions, alarming contraptions and movements that made sense only to the person who invented them.

Modern gyms leave much less room for that sort of experimentation. Equipment is purchased, insured and used largely as intended. Arriving with a hoist and asking where you can attach a pulley is unlikely to end well.

Was it worth it?

For the average trainee, almost certainly not. But that is not really the point.

Anderson believed the method helped him. He noticed that one part of his body seemed to develop more readily than another, formed a theory and built the equipment needed to test it. When other lifters laughed, he carried on.

The upside-down deadlift captures something important about Anderson’s approach to strength. Training was a practical craft. Problems could be attacked with timber, cables, straps, pulleys and enough weight. The result was sometimes clever, sometimes bizarre and occasionally both at once.

I am still looking for the original account of the squat hole. In the meantime, Paul Anderson strapped to an ironing board and pulling weights through a pulley will do nicely.

As always… Happy Lifting!