Five Minute Guide To Executing the Perfect Deadlift

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this video I'm going to do my best to teach you the proper setup and execution of the deadlift and I'm going to do it in five minutes or less hopefully. If you know me you know I'm a talker and I like to explain things so this is actually more of a challenge for me than you think it is.

The video itself ran five minutes, but this version is where I get to slow down and explain why each step exists.

Before any of the steps make sense you need the whole chain in your head, because the deadlift is one continuous force problem from the floor to lockout. The bar sits on the ground with a fixed line of gravity running straight down through it, your body has to arrange itself around that line, your hips and knees and spine and shoulders all have to lock into a position that transmits force without leaking any of it, and then your legs press the floor down while your hips finish the movement forward. Every mistake people make is a break somewhere in that chain, and once you can see the chain you can diagnose your own set the way I diagnose someone else's.

The deadlift is also the movement in the gym that has the highest risk of injury and the reason is because number one it has the most joints involved, number two there's a lot of muscles in your posterior chain that most people have underdeveloped specifically glutes, lower back and rectors, and number three and probably the biggest reason is because this movement should be the one that you can lift the most weight on.

Those three problems compound one another, each one making the next worse. More joints means more places for the position to fail. Underdeveloped glutes mean the lower back takes work it was not designed to be the primary mover for. And the heaviest load in the gym means any small error gets multiplied by the biggest number you touch all week.

This is why a lot of guys like it including myself I like to move heavy weight deadlift my strongest exercise.

So real quick not to go into the extreme details I'm just going to give you the step-by-step setup walk through how to execute and then if I need to I'll go back and explain some of the fine details to make sure you get a light.

The setup begins with the bar positioned over your midfoot, feet at shoulder width or slightly wider, not so wide that your knees push your arms out of a straight vertical line, because your arms are cables and cables only work when they hang straight down.

The reason why I want the bar over midfoot is because I want this thing to go straight up and if I go too close then I'd bend over to grab this bar you can see my shins push it away so that means I have to move the bar out of my way before I can bring it up.

Alternatively if I don't go close enough and I go down and I go to pick this thing up now what happens is I have to bring the bar close to me and my lower back starts to compensate.

Think of the bar path as a plumb line dropped from the middle of your foot to the floor. Any horizontal distance between the bar and that line is a lever arm, and a lever arm at the start of a heavy pull is torque your spine has to eat before the weight even leaves the ground. That is why midfoot is not a preference. It is the only position where the load and your base of support share the same vertical line.

The distance that you go when you bend over should be as far as it takes for your shins to touch the ball.

So if I go down here and I grab you see that's where my shins are. In this case my feet were a little bit too close so you can see grab my shins are perfectly touched on the bar.

Shins touching the bar is a self-checking cue, which is why I like it more than trying to hit some hip angle you cannot see. Your shins only touch the bar when your knees have traveled forward exactly as far as they need to and no further, and the moment you go past that your knees have to shove the bar out of the way.

I don't want to go too far because I can turn this into a squat and I don't want to go this way because again it turns it into more of a straight leg deadlift.

Those are the two failure modes on either side of the correct position. Too much knee bend drops your hips and turns the movement into a squat with a bar hanging in front of you, and too little knee bend raises your hips and hands the entire job to your hamstrings and lower back.

So once I have my foot positioned down next I'm going to reach down I'm going to grab the bar straight.

Your head comes next, and you want the crown of it pointed at the ceiling. The reason that cue works better than "look up" or "chin tucked" is that the crown of your head is the top of your spine, so aiming it at the ceiling forces the whole column into extension from your neck down through your thoracic spine.

So I like to just look at myself in the mirror makes it really easy that way I know my head is always facing the ceiling.

My goal is I want to reach as far as I can and at the same time I'm pulling the slack out of the bar.

When I do that I should hear a click so click that's how I know the slack is pulled out of the bar and I'm reaching as far as I can and I'm trying to extend my neck to the ceiling while I do that okay.

That click is real and it is mechanical. There is play between the sleeve and the collar of a loaded barbell, and if you do not take that play out before you drive, your body accelerates into an empty inch of space and then collides with the weight at speed. The click means the plates are already hanging on the bar and the bar is already hanging on your arms, so when your legs fire there is nothing left to catch up to.

When I do that my arms are going to lock out they're going to straighten the slack is going to pull out of the bar it's going to feel tight and I'll be ready for my press.

Pulling slack also pre-tensions your lats and your upper back, and that tension is what keeps the bar from drifting forward off your body in the first third of the pull. You are building a rigid connection between the floor and the bar before anything moves.

So I'm here I got my grip stretch my arms pull my head to the ceiling hear that click once I'm here I'm pushing the ground away from me I'm not pulling I'm pushing my hips or my butt should not come up before the bar does it should happen at the same time and this is a very explosive movement okay.

The push cue matters because of what your quads and glutes actually do off the floor. Your legs are the strongest engine you have and they extend the knee, so if you think about pushing the floor down you recruit them. If you think about pulling the bar up you tend to lead with your back, your hips rise first, and now you are doing a stiff-leg deadlift with a load you chose for a full deadlift.

So I'm here I grab I grab pull the slack out of the bar drive with my feet and that drive is kind of two parts.

The first part is the press and that press is here up to the knees once I get here now it's I'm shooting my hips forward as hard as I can here.

The best cue I have found for that second half is to squeeze your glutes, because your glutes are what close the hip, and telling someone to squeeze them is more reliable than telling them to think about hip extension.

So when I did it it looked like one movement it's actually a two-part movement so bar over the middle of the foot reach down make sure the crown of my head is to the ceiling stretch my arms pull my neck to the ceiling press extend and that's your deadlift.