Hide your knots.
Stand an inch or two behind the bar, so that it crosses your mid-foot over the knot in your shoelaces. Set your feet around hip width, with toes slightly out, as if you're about to do a vertical jump. Now, focus pressure through your heels, big toes and pinky toes to drive your kneecaps outward and engage your glutes.
Bar over the knot in your laces
Line up with the bar over the middle of your feet. A big mistake a lot of people make is they'll start with their shins right up to the bar... the problem is when you're right up against the bar and you get down here, the bar is going to run into your shins/knees and slow you down a little bit. Start with the bar a little further away from your shins so it travels in a straight line up to your knees and it's not being kicked out in front of you.
Animal
If she's looking straight down, the bar would be covering the knot in her shoelaces.
Juggernaut
As a general rule of thumb, the bar should start about an inch or two from your shins, or roughly over your shoelaces.
Stronger By Science
Mid foot - so I'm allowing for any knee travel, any forward shin travel when I go down to get the bar. Because I want the bar to be stationary before I take the pull.
Omar Isuf
The reason why you want this bar over the middle of your foot is because the closer that you have things to the midline of your body, the more biomechanical support you have - the stronger you'll be.
Neversate
I line up with the bar over the middle of my foot. It should stay over the middle of my foot the entire lift.
Neversate
You want the bar over your mid foot in a conventional deadlift.
Super Training
While keeping the bar close is important, having the bar too close can actually be a detriment to the athlete in finding a good start position.
Juggernaut
The bar should be located about mid-foot. In doing so, your shins can translate forward a bit more, which then allows you to get you armpits directly over the bar (use the bar as a counterbalance to "pull" the chest up), which places you in a better line of pull.
T-Nation
Set up with the bar directly over the feet. If you set up too far away from the bar, you end up doing some kind of half-assed front delt raise.
T-Nation
Feet around hip width
I try to set my feet at a position just like I would if I was going to do a standing vertical jump test... where they are going to create the most forced possible into the floor, which is the exact same thing that you're doing here, except there is a bar in your hands...
Neversate
Bring his feet under his hips and drive his toes out a couple degrees.
Szat Strength
You're going to want to set up around where you do a vertical leap... Take a standing vertical leap, where would your feet set up? That's going to get you close to a position where you would start your deadlift.
Super Training
The best place to start is simply by performing a vertical jump, and noting what stance you naturally gravitate toward...In general, you’ll find that you’ll feel the strongest and most comfortable in this test with your feet right around hip width. Generally, larger people who have a bit more of a gut to fit between their thighs pull with a slightly wider stance than smaller conventional deadlifters.
Stronger By Science
Finding the stance: the place where we like to start with stance width is the same place that you would do a vertical jump from or a box jump from. So the feet are pretty much going to be under the hips... maybe a slight adjustment in or out from that based on personal preference.
Juggernaut
When setting up for the pull, turn the toes slightly OUTWARD. This will enable a fuller contraction of the glutes and help your lockout.
Westside Barbell
If you set up too wide, the knees have nowhere to go but in, and that can spell trouble. Instead, I coach people to set up with a narrower stance and to focus on pushing the knees out slightly.
T-Nation
Turning your feet out a little farther helps a bit with breaking the bar off the floor and generating a bit more speed at the start of the lift, and pointing your feet straighter ahead helps a bit with lockout strength.
Stronger By Science
I try to point my toes out a little bit so that my knees track correctly. If you keep your toes straight forward, a lot of times your knees will tend to collapse in... upping your chance of
injury big-time [and] when your knees collapse in your butt shoots back, which is going to make that bar go forward and change the balance which is going to make that thing feel about 20 times heavier than it actually is. So point your toes out people.
Neversate
Drive your kneecaps out
I really like to cue full foot contact as well as screw-driving the feet into the ground. This is huge... what you need to think about is your heel, your big toe, and your pinky toe are all in contact with the ground, and wherever your start position is... I want you to twist those into the ground and create an artificial arch in your foot - especially people who have flat feet. This is going to ensure you get your glutes active while ensuring your big toe, heel and pinky toe are down...I do this the entire time. I twist my feet into the ground... and that ensures I'm keeping those glutes active.
Brendan Tietz
To ensure that we're starting the lift as well as possible, she's maintained even pressure throughout her foot. We don't want to be rocked forward onto the toes nor do we want to be so far back on the heels that the toes come off the ground... We wanna have have even foot pressure (big toe, little toe, and heel) even weight distribution between those three points of contact.
Neversate
The more we turn the toes out, the more the hips can rotate out and contribute glute contraction. However you can take this too far. If we go too duck-footed, now we lose our center of gravity [and] we have balance issues and on top of that, the quads can't contribute much.
Brendan Tietz
I'm not thinking about pushing my knees forward. I'm pushing them out. So like if you were to look at my feet, I'm applying pressure this way (outward), so if they were able to slide, they'd be coming out (to the sides)... I'm standing here right now, I'm relaxed, knees are the straight forward, I can't feel my glutes at all. But as soon as I screw them out, when my knees come out... I can feel my glutes firing here.
Omar Isuf
Bending your knees leads to some forward knee travel. Pushing your knees out actually brings them back. You can keep your knees bent to the same degree without setting them too far forward, and now you can keep the bar closer to your body as you pull.
Alan Thrall
Lifters need to learn the "tripod" foot, which means the foot has three points of contact with the ground. That larger base of support is essential for creating a rigid foot through which you can put force into the ground.
T-Nation