They share a bar, a hinge, and most of a name, so it's fair to ask: what's actually different between a Romanian deadlift and a conventional one — and which should you be doing?
Short version: they're the same movement pattern entered from opposite doors, and each door teaches something the other can't.
The conventional — floor first
A conventional deadlift starts from a dead bar on the floor. Every rep begins with a full setup — hips between knees and shoulders, spine set long, lats on — and ends standing tall at lockout. Because the bar starts dead, the conventional trains the hardest skill in pulling: producing force from zero, out of the least forgiving position. It also spans the largest range — floor to lockout — which is why it's the lift the other lift is compared to.
The RDL — top first, floor never
A Romanian deadlift starts from the top, standing tall, and the bar never touches down. You push the hips back — knees staying soft, bending only slightly — and slide the bar down the front of your thighs to just below the knee, spine holding one shape the whole way. Then the hips drive through and you stand. No floor, no lockout off the ground, no dead-start.
What the RDL removes is exactly what makes it valuable: with no floor to reach, there's no way to sneak depth by bending the spine or the knees. Depth is earned by hamstrings — the bar goes only as far as your hamstrings can lengthen while the back holds its shape — and never by the spine. That constraint makes the RDL the purest hinge-patterning tool with a barbell: it's the hinge, isolated, with exactly the muscles the deadlift wants loaded.
Which one you need right now
If your conventional pull has the classic pattern faults — back that rounds off the floor, hips shooting up early, a lift you feel entirely in your lumbar — the RDL is usually the smarter place to spend your reps for a while. It rehearses the hips-back, hamstrings-loaded, one-spine-shape pattern on every rep, without the floor tempting you to compromise for depth. 3 sets of 8, light to moderate, chasing the hamstring stretch rather than the load. Many lifters find their conventional quietly improves during weeks they barely pulled from the floor at all.
If your pattern is stable and your goal is total strength, the conventional is the main course and the RDL is the accessory that keeps the hinge sharp and the hamstrings strong.
And judge each by its own standard: an RDL isn't a shallow conventional — the bar reaching just below the knee is the complete rep, and knees that barely bend are the design, not a limitation. Grading one lift by the other's checkpoints is how good reps get coached into worse ones.
Both variants tell their story clearly from a side-on phone clip — hip travel, knee bend, spine shape, how deep the bar rides. CoachVision's AI coach reads whichever variant you tell it you're pulling and grades it against that variant's own standard, giving you an honest measured read on your hinge and back shape. Film a set of each this week; seeing your own two versions side by side is the fastest way to understand what each lift is teaching you.