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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Sticking to that New Year’s Resolution

Due to popular demand, I will touch on New Year’s fitness and health resolutions. The annual reoccurring trend. While I believe anytime is a good time to start making changes for the better, the time stamp of a new year is something special. I figured that since we’re a few weeks into the New Year, and resolutioners are facing the struggles of sticking to the new plan, it would be beneficial to touch on this topic.

Of course, the hardest part of a new healthy lifestyle plan is actually following it. Depending on your starting point and what your body is accustomed to, the amount of change in habits and lifestyle can be significant. Unfortunately, our bodies do not like rapid change, and become very uncomfortable when we decide to switch things up on them. 

First, habits are hard to change. It takes a significant amount of time to reset the neural wiring in our brains and change the natural predisposition we have to going about our days. If you are interested in how formulating habits works and how to change them, I recommend the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. A few take home points include that you need to create a positive feedback loop to help reinforce your good habits, the adjustment period takes a lot of mental energy to make a change, and once you’ve developed a new habit, it turns into a default setting for our bodies that we end up doing automatically. 

Diving a little deeper into the adjustment phase and the discomfort you will feel making the change, you should take into consideration how much mental and physical strain this will take on your body. This is where resoultioners fail. Attempting to make a change that is too drastic will send your body into an almost shock-like response. Remember, our bodies do not like change because change requires us to use excess energy and mental capacity. When we try and make too big of a change all at once, our bodies will fight against us with everything it has.

”Small changes for big results”

This brings us to the point of making small changes to achieve big results. You can think about this in the sense of a minimal effective load, meaning that you need to do just enough to get the result you want and no more. Traditionally, resoultioners go all out and their bodies go into high alert mood. Once this happens, it’s game over. This occurs when you drastically change your diet and exercise routine over the course of one day, or in an otherwise short period of time. Your body is going to respond negatively and put an end to the change by making it incredibly difficult, physically and mentally, to stick to the plan. You’ve, in a sense, triggered a “change detector” alarm and now it’s on full alert. Try to make a change now; it’s going to be almost impossible. This is one of the reasons why so many fail. 

Taking a “small changes” approach keeps your body’s change alarm at bay and allows you to sneak things past it. This makes it easier to stick to changes you are trying to make. The only disappointing thing here is that the results don’t always show in a day, or a week, or a month. These small changes will add up over time and become something much larger. Longer term thinking is huge here. It’s too easy to think in the short term. Take an even further look down the road and think about where the small changes will get you in 2, 5, even 10 years. Pace yourself, and the plan, with small increments of change and you’ll be surprisingly happy with the results. 

These small changes are easier to make. Who doesn’t like things they know they will succeed at? For example, small goals and their progressions can include:

Going for a 15-minute walk, progressing to 20 minutes, to 25 minutes, to 30 minutes.

Going to the gym and performing 3 sets of 10 repetitions on 3 exercises, progressing to 3 sets of 12 repetitions, to 3 sets of 15 repetitions.

These are not by any means the coolest things, or the most exciting. However, taking a closer look at what you are accomplishing is very important. To use the walking example, yes you are getting more activity, but you are also teaching yourself how to carve out time during your day to promote a healthier life habit. Yes, walking is fairly easy and may feel like you are not doing much. One thing at a time, though. Making the time is a mentally taxing thing. If you throw in a highly demanding activity on top of that, it will make it much harder to stick to. Keeping with the example of walking, now that you’ve made time for yourself and are sticking to the 30-minute routine, you can change one more variable. Remember, small changes for big results. The next small change could be running for 5 of the 30 minutes. Not the whole 30 minutes, just 5. After sticking to that for a week of two, maybe bump up the running time to 8-10 minutes out of the 30. Then add a few more minutes running every week or two and you’ll be running 30 minutes before you know it. 

I could go on and on about small changes and progressions, but I think you can get the idea from the above example. Finding the small, easily obtainable changes will make things easier on your body without triggering its change alarm. If you set it off by attempting to do too much at once, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. I wish all you New Year’s resoultioners all the best; keep working hard. 

As always, thanks for reading!

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

If you enjoyed this and would like to help me out please share this article! 

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