How to Deadlift: The Set Up

In previous posts, I’ve discussed foot placement and hand placement/grips when setting up to deadlift. In this post, I’ll go over how to set up for the deadlift before you start to pull the bar off the floor. 

First, you want to place your feet and hands correctly on the bar. These placements should serve as reference points for the rest of your set up.  After getting your foot and hand placement right, you want to optimally position your body in order to pull the bar off the ground, with the best mechanical efficiency possible. To do this, you want your shins to be relatively vertical, your hips to move back, and your torso to lean slightly forward (figure1).  The deadlift is referred to as a “hip hinge” movement pattern.  This is not a squat, which is a knee-dominant movement pattern. A hip-dominant pattern like the deadlift requires you to use your glutes and hamstrings (a.k.a. your posterior chain) more than you would during a squat, which is more of an anterior chain movement, utilizing the quadriceps muscles to a greater extent. 

Figure 1: Deadlift setup

Relatively speaking, your hips will be higher at the start of a deadlift than the lowest point that your hips reach in a squat (figure 2). When deadlifting, your hips only need to get as low as necessary to get your hands on the bar.  Once you are in this position you will need to gather tension throughout your body before you start to pull the bar. This will allow you to better hold your position when you're lifting the weight, preventing you from rounding your back, tipping forward onto your toes, or compromising your deadlift position in some other way, shape, or form. 

Figure 2: Deadlift compared to a squat.

In order to gather tension in your body, you need to first set your lats. When setting your lats you need to imagine pulling the bar into your body/towards your shins. Doing this will help activate your lats and keep the bar close to your body later on when pulling the bar from the floor. 

 The next step to gather tension in your body is bracing your core. This is sometimes referred to as a Valsalva maneuver. A note on the Valsalva maneuver: if you are a healthy normal person and do not have high blood pressure, performing at Valsalva maneuver is not incorrect. In fact, it is the body's natural way of achieving spine stability as a protective mechanism so we don't injure ourselves. You can brace your core by breathing into your stomach and contracting your abdominals in order to create spinal stability and tension through your torso.

The next step is to slowly start to pull on the bar. This should not be an aggressive or violent motion that pulls you out of your position.  Doing this should allow you to start to turn on musculature that you have not turned on yet, helping you hold a better spine position and keep you aligned to lift the weight.

By this point you may not feel the most comfortable globally throughout your body. You're attempting to pull a relatively heavy weight off the floor while keeping your spine stable and lifting a weight that will help you get stronger, grow more muscle, and improve your physical performance.

Now you're ready to start to pull, the actual act of lifting the weight. We will go over this in the next post so stay tuned. 

As always, thanks for reading!

Ryan Goodell, PT, DPT, CSCS

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You Can’t Beat Physiology

Fitness goals and the various roads towards achieving them are frequently misunderstood, in my opinion. Often in conversation about fitness goals someone will state what they are trying to accomplish, but their idea of how to actually go about accomplishing it may be a little off. While there are many ways to reach a destination, knowing the physiology behind what you are doing is crucial to getting yourself on a more direct route. If you can understand these principles and physiological processes that contribute to eliciting the result you desire, you might be pleasantly surprised with the easy progress you see, instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

1. A common one: losing/gaining weight. When considering the physiology of weight loss or gain, there is one process that rules above all: the law of thermogenesis. Thermogenesis is simply the balance between energy in and energy out, also counted in calories. If your calories in exceed calories out, your weight goes up, and if calories out exceed calories in, you lose weight. That equation is pretty simple. Another physiological gold nugget is the fact that muscle is the most metabolically demanding part of our bodies, so the more you have, the larger calorie-burning metabolic furnace you will have.

2. Getting “huge,” or relatively huge. Taking thermodynamics into consideration again, you need to be in a calorie surplus to make those muscles bigger. If you don’t have extra supplies to make more muscle, you can’t expect to get bigger. On top of that, you need to perform strength activities where you are working at 70-75+% of your 1 rep max (RM) and increase the amount of volume you are performing, or perform ultra-sets with ~50% of 1RM and go till failure to get large quantities of volume. “Volume” refers to the number of sets x number of reps x weight being used. Increased volume stimulates the physiological process of muscle hypertrophy when you are in a calorie surplus. 

3. Running/sprinting or jumping higher. This is a more interesting example, consisting of a combination of muscle and neurologic adaptions that you are trying to improve. Muscularly, you need to improve the performance of your type 2 muscle fibers, which are you power/high force producing fibers. Conversely, type 1 fibers are closer towards the endurance side of the spectrum and are meant for prolonged activity. To stimulate type 2 fiber development, you have to perform activities such as maximal effort lifts, like squats and deadlifts, working at 90+% of your 1RM to improve maximal strength. Secondly, on the neurological side of things, performing dynamic effort lifts (like squats and deadlifts) at 50-70% of your 1RM while intending to move the weight as quickly as possible improves your ability to recruit type 2 fibers quickly and all at once. Performing plyometric jumps will also improve your ability to use your passive elastic structures to absorb and transfer force, making you more “springy.”

As you can see from the above examples, each training goal requires a slightly different stimulus to get the desired physiological result. Each training modality has a different effect on your physiology and will dictate how well you are moving towards what your end goal is. A better understanding of the physiology of what is going on will make your training more efficient and less frustrating. 

If you have any questions about additional examples of how to manipulate training to affect physiology, you can leave them in the comments below! Train smart, my friends :)

Thanks for reading,

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

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New posts every Sunday! 

If you are interested in other content from Weights and Stuff you can find it at:

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