For a lot of us strength training women out there, prioritizing our physical health is crucial.
Although transforming your physique is one of the biggest and best benefits of strength training, there are certain exercises that can provide so many benefits beyond muscle building.
And dead hangs happen to be one of those exercises.
Dead hangs are a simple strength training exercise that can have huge benefits for your overall health.
In this post, I want to explore all the ways that daily dead hangs can improve your fitness and health. As well as how to effectively incorporate them into your strength training routine.
What Makes Dead Hangs So Beneficial for Weightlifting Women
As an active women, your body becomes accustomed to your exercise routine and the exercises you do.
The more you do a certain motion or exercise, the more your body gets used to that pattern of movement.
As a weightlifter, your body will primarily become accustomed to your weight training patterns.
However, one often overlooked, major element of your health is mobility and flexibility.
And if you think about it, weight train doesn’t specifically target training your mobility.
At least, not in the same ways that mobility specific exercises would.
As a result, often times as a weightlifter, your body isn’t becoming accustomed to being mobile and flexible.
Instead, it’s becoming accustomed to lifting strong and generating power.
Which is great, but you still don’t want to avoid entirely overlooking your mobility.
Additionally, weightlifting can often lead to stiffness in your body if you don’t recover correctly.
Weight Lifting Leads to Muscle Stiffness
As someone who frequently lifts heavy and doesn’t practice any mobility, you leave yourself at a high risk muscle stiffness and restricted movement.
Mainly because weightlifting causes soreness, and soreness causes stiffness and immobility.
So if you don’t find a way to get your muscles stretching and moving again, you’ll likely end up with some pretty tight feeling muscles.
And this isn’t necessarily a problem. Until things start aching and nagging and feeling tight all over the place.
To combat this problem, it’s essential to find ways to allow your body to decompress and stay mobile.
Especially if you want to increase your overall health and longevity. And want to stay a mobile and active woman for as long as possible.
Although they’re often an overlooked exercise, dead hangs are an excellent way to do this.
How to Perform Dead Hangs Correctly for Best Results
As with any exercise in the gym, it’s crucial for you to perform the exercise correctly. If you want to see the best results.
Thankfully with dead hangs, there’s nothing too complicated about the form or the exercise.
So doing them correctly should be pretty simple.
Still, I’ll walk you through the correct form step-by-step to keep things as simple as possible.
I also want to give you some secret pointers to help the exercise be most effective.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Performing Your First Dead Hang:
1. Find a pull-up bar or a high placed barbell on a squat rack
2. Give yourself something to step up on to put yourself within reach of the bar
3. Grab onto the bar, let your feet hang, and hold on for as long as you can
With dead hangs, you aren’t repping out an exercise, so there’s really no goal rep range you’re shooting for.
I do like to consider each time you hang on until failure to be one set.
Going with this, to see the best results, it’s best to do 2 to 4 sets of dead hangs each until failure.
Now, some important tips to keep in mind to make this exercise most effective:
1. Prioritize keeping your body stabilized, avoid swinging back and forth.
2. Keep your core tucked. This will help strengthen your core as well as avoid over-extending your back muscles.
3. Keep a slight amount of tension in your lats and avoid allowing them to over extend. This will help prevent over stretching your shoulders.
These reminders won’t make or break your dead hangs, but they are helpful in allowing you to get the most out of the exercise.
That’s basically all there is too it!
This is probably one of the most simple exercises you’ll ever do in the gym. Essentially, all you need to do is hang onto a bar and dangle from it!
The 6 Major Benefits of Incorporating Dead Hangs into Your Routine
Now that I’ve touched base on why dead hangs are beneficial, I want to talk more about the different ways in which they’re beneficial.
Basically, the benefits you can see within yourself.
Dead Hangs Help Improve Spinal Health
When doing a dead hang, you’re basically letting gravity do all the work of the exercise for you.
All you have to do is dangle while letting gravity pull on and extend your body. Lengthening your spine in the process.
The process is sort of similar to stretching and training mobility in other parts of your body. All you’re doing is lengthening and mobilizing the areas.
As your spine lengthens, it stretches out. And when it stretches out, it also aligns itself.
Think about when you have a rope that’s all loose and curvy.
As soon as you pull that rope taught, or let it dangle and let gravity do the work, it straightens out immediately.
The same visual can be applied to your back and spine.
And the whole process is super beneficial for your spinal health.
Stretching and Lengthening Releases Tension in Your Spine:
When you’re spine lengthens and stretches, you release so much tension from the discs in your spine.
This helps your entire spine relax and decompress.
And think about it, our spine provides constant support for our bodies. All day long!
Whenever we’re doing any type of activity, standing, sitting, running, etc., our spine is working and engaged.
Constantly giving our bodies support and balance to hold us in place.
This puts our spines under tons and tons of tension, constantly everyday. Think of how tired your spine must be!
Of course, that’s what they’re designed for. But any type of relief from this tension can provide your spine with just a little break.
Helping it rejuvenate and remain strong and healthy.
Dead Hangs Help Relieve Lower Back Pain
Like I mentioned previously, dead hangs allow your spine to lengthen and decompress.
With this, the tension and stress that’s constantly put on your spine loosens. And all the discs within it get a little break.
Now your spine can open up, relax, and take a breather for a moment!
So you know this provides excellent benefits and relief for your spine.
But it also provides benefits and relief for your back.
Which makes sense, since your spine and back go hand in hand.
Anyone who suffers from lower back pain, the spine often times plays a tremendous role in that.
Just like anyone who has a strong, straight, healthy back. Your spine health plays a tremendous role in that as well.
So if you have consistent back pains, allowing your spine the time to loosen up and release tension might be all that you need.
Dead Hangs Help Stretch Your Upper Body
Similarly to the way that dead hangs help stretch and release your back, they do the same for your upper body.
Hanging on and letting gravity do it’s thing, the muscles in your upper body extend and get a huge stretch.
Most specifically, the muscles in the areas around your neck, upper back, and shoulders get the biggest, longest stretch.
This is a great exercise for women who train upper body in the gym.
Dead hangs help promote upper body health, flexibility, and recovery from strenuous upper body exercises.
And Increase Upper Body Mobility
As you can imagine, with this stretching also comes improved and increased movement.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that dead hangs also improve mobility in your upper body.
Similarly to the way that yoga and stretches improve mobility in the rest of the body, they also do in your upper body.
Improved mobility and flexibility in your upper body will help improve tons of your exercises in the gym, both for your upper and lower body.
When you can move better, you can do better!
Almost every activity you do becomes easier. Including things as simple as everyday activities inside and outside the house.
Increased movement and mobility means increased blood flow to the area. Increased blood flow allows improved performance, recovery, and muscular and joint health.
Dead Hangs Help Improve Posture
Your spinal health and upper body play a huge role in your posture. So much bigger than many people understand!
Many postural issues that people suffer from often start in the spine and upper body.
Which only worsens with how many of us spend tons of time sitting, standing, or hovering over a screen.
This only does harms for our posture!
The good news is, dead hangs are a great way to counteract these effects.
How Dead Hangs Help Improve Posture
First off, the lengthening of our spine that happens during the exercise can help realign and straighten things up.
This works wonders for straightening your back and improving unwanted curves in your spine.
Secondly, the improved mobility and flexibility is huge for improving posture.
The Impact of Your Upper Body On Your Posture:
Most of us don’t realize it, but your upper body health plays a huge role in your posture.
Your upper body mobility can really make or break things!
Tightness in your shoulders, neck, and upper back can cause so many postural issues.
Things like rib flare, an anterior pelvic tilt, and forward head posture will often times be the result of upper body tightness.
Or, over correcting and over exaggerating proper posture to try and “fix” incorrect posture from upper body tightness.
For example, slouched shoulders and forward head posture result from a tight upper body.
But when trying to fix this posture, you’re upper body mobility is still limited.
So instead of achieving a straight spine, you arch your back, puff out your chest, and end up with flared ribs and an anterior pelvic tilt.
The real problem is that we see these issues come up in the ways our ribs, hips, and back sit.
But we never see the root cause of the problem, our upper body tightness!
So instead of fixing the root cause, we go to fix the places the root cause reveals itself. Like our flared ribs or over arched back.
Moral of the story is, if you have postural issues, improving your upper body mobility is your best bet. And dead hangs are a great way to do that.
Dead Hangs Improve Grip Strength for Improved Weight Training
The final benefit of practicing dead hangs is that they improve your grip strength.
The best exercise to use as a grip strength example is RDL’s.
When doing RDL’s, you might find it hard to hold onto the weight or that your hands give out before your legs do.
The reason for this is because of your grip strength.
Essentially, grip strength is how much weight your hands can hold and for how long.
It’s also why tons of people use wrist straps in the gym.
They help you lift heavier weight without relying solely on your grip strength.
When you’re doing dead hangs, you need strong grip to hold yourself up. The longer you hold on, the stronger your grip will become.
And although it might seem easy, it’s a lot harder than it looks to hold on very long.
Your fingers start slipping, your hands get tired, your arms start to give out. Slowly you start falling. Everything tempting you to let go!
But the longer your practice holding on, the stronger your hands and forearms will become.
Your hands, fingers, and forearms are what play the biggest role in your grip strength.
Grip strength is crucial for tons of exercises in the gym.
So strengthening your grip strength is extremely beneficial as a weightlifter.
It’ll help you lift heavier, improve your lifts, and see more results.
How to Incorporate Dead Hangs into Your Routine
At this point, I’ve talked a lot about how and why to do dead hangs.
Now I want to talk about how you can incorporate them into your routine.
Because as always, you can’t see the benefits of an exercise without actually doing it consistently.
Now, there’s nothing too tricky about incorporating dead hangs into your workout routine.
Essentially, you can do them whenever you want!
Even though they’re a strength training exercise, they’re not targeting any of your muscles specifically for growth.
They do still require grip strength to hold you up, but beyond that the purpose of the exercise isn’t for strength or muscle growth.
That means that there aren’t really any muscles that would need recovery time in the days following the exercise.
With the exception of maybe your forearms and hands. But if these are sore, you can adjust your routine accordingly to allow for some more rest.
Once you start incorporating dead hangs into your workouts, keep in mind it’s best to do them at the end of your workout for the day.
Just like you’d do your compound exercises before your isolation exercises.
You always want to do the most energy requiring, muscle building exercises first.
So if you do your dead hangs on an upper body day, you don’t want to pre fatigue your muscles before your bigger lifts.
Other than that, there are a few different ways to incorporate dead hangs into your strength training routine.
Three Ways to Incorporate Dead Hangs into Your Strength Training Routine
Here are some of the different ways you can incorporate dead hangs into your strength training routine.
Along with the benefits and potential downfalls of each way.
Incorporate dead hangs at the end of your upper body days:
This is great because your upper body muscles will already be tired and fatigued, so you can do these as a finisher for a little extra burn.
Additionally, the stretches will act as a cool down and help jump start your recovery.
Incorporate dead hangs after lower body days:
Doing this can help speed up your upper body recovery on it’s off days.
Just be cautious of doing these if your upper body is still sore from your previous workouts.
Incorporate dead hangs every day you workout!
There’s really no way to over train when doing dead hangs, since the main goal with them isn’t to build muscle.
As a result, as long as your upper body isn’t sore, you can incorporate them after every workout for maximum benefits.
Takeaways
As weightlifting women, one thing we don’t want to overlook is our mobility.
Dead hangs are an excellent exercise to help with that!
Not only are dead hangs great for improving upper body and spinal mobility, they also play a tremendous role in improving your posture, spinal health, and grip strength.
On top of that, they’re one of the most simple, yet beneficial exercises you’ll ever do in the gym.
Start adding dead hangs to your routine now and watch how your life and body changes!
More of My Posts on Women’s Weightlifting and Fitness:
Why Women Should Train Upper Body in the Gym