| Reference | Source | Link | Type | Step | Exercise | Cue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Grip the bar with your arms hanging straight down from your shoulders. If your grip is too narrow or too wide you'll have to bend down farther increasing the range of motion, and negatively affecting your leverage at the start. | T-Nation | Text | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
Grasp the barbell with a grip that puts your forearms right up against the sides of your thighs; the further out they are, the harder it'll be for you to maintain neutral spine — and the further the bar will have to travel. | T-Nation | Text | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
Take the narrowest grip you can without forcing your knees to cave in, or without causing undue friction between your arms and thighs at the start of the lift...If your arms are brushing your thighs but not really grinding against them, your grip width is solid. | Stronger By Science | Text | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
The bar should start right beneath the shoulder blades, close to the shins. This will set you up for a proper pull – the bar will go up and down in a straight line. | T-Nation | Text | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Scaps Over Bar | |
First, make sure your armpits are right above the bar. Many people set up with their armpits too far forward. This causes your body weight to tip forward into your toes which puts strain on the back. | T-Nation | Text | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Scaps Over Bar | |
Grip the shit out of the bar, but leave your upper arms relaxed. Don’t try to row the bar when you’re deadlifting it. Always grip the bar harder than you need to. | Stronger By Science | Text | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Squeeze | |
Keep your chest high while pushing your hips back. Imagine someone has a rope tied around your waist and is pulling you backward. | T-Nation | Text | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | |
The hips should be down and back which will leave the shins in an almost vertical position. | T-Nation | Text | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Hips Below Shoulders | |
You need to make sure your body is tight enough that your form won’t disintegrate as soon as you start lifting the bar. This is often called “pulling the slack out of the bar.” I prefer to think of it as “pulling tension into your body,” because there’s not really any “slack” in the bar. | Stronger By Science | Text | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Full tension | |
Create as much tension throughout your body as humanly possible before adding the extra force required to start pulling the rep. | Stronger By Science | Text | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Full tension | |
If a lifter doesn't pull the bar up so that it's making contact with the top of the rim in the hole of the plates, he's initially not going to be working against any resistance. By not working against any resistance, it's extremely difficult to produce an isometric contraction in the spinal erector musculature and the lats that's strong enough to lock the lumbar spine into extension during the movement. | T-Nation | Text | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Full tension | |
You can't effectively transfer force from your lower body and core to the bar if your elbows are flexed...this is a great way to rupture a biceps tendon and guarantee that you aren't pulling as heavy as you ought to be. | T-Nation | Text | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Elbows locked. | |
You need to imagine your arms as just hooks; you shouldn't have any bend in your elbows at the start of your pull. Lest you think this is just a minor distinction, simply "yanking" the bar with your arms is a fine way to wind up on the operating table with a torn biceps! | T-Nation | Text | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Elbows locked. | |
Use these two cues to further engage your lats: Protect your armpits. Squeeze an orange in your armpit. | T-Nation | Text | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
The next time you deadlift, think about someone tickling your armpits. Your goal is to try to stop them without using your hands. | T-Nation | Text | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
...to pull the slack out of the bar and then pull the slack out of my body, I literally use the bar to try to wedge my body between the bar and the floor. | Neversate | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
Once my hips are in a good position, my next cue is thinking
about locking in my lats... by trying to bend the bar across my shins like it is a horseshoe, but a lot of other people will get the idea of covering up their armpit with their shoulder or trying to make the triangle of your torso your arm and your thigh shrink. Some people talk about sticking their shoulder blades in their back pocket. | Neversate | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
Squeeze that bar like it owes you money. Never stop squeezing a
bar with any lift - never ever stop squeezing as hard as you can! | Neversate | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Squeeze | |
I try to keep my hands as close to my legs as possible, because the further apart you get... it lengthens your bar path, which makes it heavier and harder. So you want to shorten that as much as possible by keeping your hands as tight as possible to your legs... | Neversate | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
Our starting position for a deadlift is going to be scapula (which is where our arms connect to our body) over the bar and our shins perpendicular to the ground. | Super Training | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Scaps Over Bar | |
You want to maximize that hamstrings tension in your start position. | Juggernaut | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | ||
My first move to reach down and grab the bar is to begin driving my hips back. I'm maintaining even pressure throughout my foot the whole time and I'm trying to trying to arch and keep a flat low back position until I can barely touch the bar here and then I'll use the bar to leverage myself and pull myself down into position the rest of the way. | Juggernaut | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | |
Because the first move is gonna be a hip hinge, she's gonna push back with her hips to reach down and grab the bar, and it's gonna allow her to maintain this pretty vertical shin position and a lot of tension through the hamstrings. A good way to think of this is if you were buried up to your knees so your shin is locked into position that she can only move now from the hip. So the hips push back, we load tension into the hamstring as she reaches down to grab the bar. | Juggernaut | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | |
The best deadlifters in the world start with a vertical shin position... because their bodies are proportionate in such a way to allow them to achieve that. Not everyone is going to be able to start with that great vertical shin position... You may have to have a little bit more forward shin position, but you should be trying to strive for that very vertical shin position. | Juggernaut | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Vertical Shins | |
I never think about picking up the bar. I'm always trying to drive my
legs into the ground. | Neversate | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
Bend over at the waist, pull up on the bar, now pull the hips in. You're going to drive them in, never letting go of that tension... We want to think about wedging our hips under the bar... in the setup and through the lift. | Super Training | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
Your hips should always be below your shoulders. The way some people are built, their hips are going to be way below their shoulders and people are going to kind of be pushing that line a little bit... | Neversate | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Hips Below Shoulders | |
You'll see the bar almost comes off the ground before I even pull it because I'm so tight. You want to get really tight through your lats, upper back, hamstrings and the bar will almost be pulling off the ground before you even try to pull... Rather than pull for speed, I try to ease the bar off the floor... otherwise you're going to get to your knees, it's going to whip hard and you'll miss your lockouts. | Animal | Video | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Full tension | |
When I get my grip, the first thing I'm going to do is lock my arms as hard as I can. You want to think as if your elbow doesn't even bend. That elbow joint doesn't hinge at all. You just want to get these arms straight as possible. That's going to get... your lats locked in tighter. We'll get our grip, lock the arms hard, and then I'm going to rotate the elbows back... We'll just rotate our elbows towards your body. That'll get you even tighter again. | Animal | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Elbows locked. | |
Rather than just sitting your hips down I want you to let your hips fall back and gradually sink down as you fall back. Use the barbell as a counterweight to prevent yourself from falling on your back. Pull up on the barbell as your hips fall back. You'll need some weight on the bar to actually be able to leverage it. You are loading your spring so that when it's time to drive your feet into the floor all of that energy in your body transfers into the barbell. Once you are in the correct starting position, that weight will be quivering to come off the ground. I'm not just sitting my hips down in position. I'm pulling myself down into position. | Alan Thrall | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
Elbows will initiate a move in the shoulder as far as tightness goes...bringing them in close to the body and pointing them back a little bit further, that's one way of winding up the shoulder and getting more tightness. You're taking [your grip] and kind of screwing it in a little bit... so we go from a relaxed position to a loaded position as we get ready to pull. | Super Training | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
We see a lot of people rush the bar off the ground... and they'll lock their knees too early. Be patient. If it takes a minute to come off... the ground that's okay. Stay in position. You'll finish. | Super Training | Video | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Be patient | |
Scapula directly over the bar - mid foot, straight line - and you see his shins are perpendicular. | Super Training | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Scaps Over Bar | |
Generally I suggest a lifter takes a shoulder-width grip on the bar that produces vertical arms from the front. | Alan Thrall | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
Push the world away. Don't lift the bar. [People] thinking about lifting the bar end up rolling their back or they'll unravel and a cat back kind of motion... but if they keep their chest high and push the world away (almost like
they're performing a leg press) things seem to go better. | Neversate | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
I'm literally trying to think about wedging my body between the floor and the barbell, pulling that slack out and then I explode. | Neversate | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Explode | |
You broke the inertia to get the bar off the ground, now you want to get in a hurry and speed it up... The faster that you're moving that bar, the less likely it is to get stuck at one of your sticking points. The momentum that you're creating by trying to accelerate the bar is going to continue throughout the entire lift. The absolute worst thing you can do is let that bar slow down. | Neversate | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Explode | |
As soon as the bar hits the middle of your kneecap, you should be driving your hips forward as hard as possible and flexing your butt. | Neversate | Video | Drive your hips through. | Deadlift | Drive the hips | |
[Do] a Romanian deadlift down to the barbell. Keep the tension on your hamstrings. | Alan Thrall | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | |
Pretend you are in prison and you were trying to send the message that you are not open for business. | Alan Thrall | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
When most people think about picking something up... they're thinking that they're initiating that movement at their hands...but that's not true. Instead, think about pushing the floor away. This will help you keep a much more stable and erect body position so your hips don't shoot first. Instead, you're going to be initiating your legs and your upper body is going to be trying to hold as stable as possible - almost like you're sitting in a leg press machine. | Neversate | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
I'm gonna pull up and then lean back and wedge into position so... I'm almost rocking back to... use [the weight on the bar] as a counterbalance... | Brendan Tietz | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
When you sit down into it, I want you to try and sit back into it until you feel yourself starting to fall a tiny tiny bit. Don't actually fall! Just feel some pressure being applied [upward] on the bar... Right when you feel your bodyweight starting to apply pressure and your shoulder is just ever so slightly in front of the bar. | Super Training | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
Elbows locked and loaded. | ||||||
As soon as that bar gets to the top of your kneecaps, you want to engage your butt. You want to start flexing and trying to drive your hips forward. That is going to help that bar go vertical... You'll be shocked at how it will help solve some of your lockout problems. | Neversate | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
The cue that I like to tell someone to finish tall, finish with their hips through... The idea is you want them to finish tall - not over-extended or where their butt's sticking out. | T-Nation | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
In my mind, I'm trying to drive my feet through the ground. I'm trying to wedge myself in between the bar and the ground and drive my heels through. | Alan Thrall | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
[Imagine an orange in your armpit.] Squeeze the orange in the armpit. Make orange juice in the armpit... When people get set up, they're gonna squeeze the orange in the armpit so their lats are on, their upper back is nice and tight, and then they're going to come up and finish. But I don't want them to lose the shoulders on the way down, so they have to continue squeezing the orange on the way down so they keep a solid back position and keep that upright torso. | T-Nation | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
You want to think about putting force into ground and pushing away, rather than just pulling the bar off the floor. Another option is to think about "pushing the ground away from you." | T-Nation | Text | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
Now think, "Armpits over the bar, with maximal hamstring tension." | T-Nation | Text | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Scaps Over Bar | |
Basically, when you bend over to grab the barbell, you want to use it as a counterbalance to "pull" your chest up and get the hips down, "wedging" yourself between the bar and the floor. | T-Nation | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
Push your feet through the floor rather than just picking the bar up. Yry creating separation between the floor and the barbell by driving your feet through the floor and trying to push the ground away from you. | Alan Thrall | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
Too often, I see someone standing up and locking their knees out, but failing to lock out their hips.... What I want you to do instead is squeeze your glutes together and get your hips through. Make love to the bar... Squeeze them booty cheeks and violently fire your hips forward. | Alan Thrall | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
Try to get your face and your body back behind the bar a little bit. We also want to intentionally drive the knees forward of the barbell slightly. | Neversate | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
It doesn't matter how fast you can get the weight off the floor if you can't lock it out. So instead I like to think about being patient... because otherwise I lose that position... [By] keeping my lats set, I can get that explosion towards the top of the lift rather than the bottom - where all that momentum is kind of wasted. | Juggernaut | Video | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Be patient | |
It's critical that the shoulders and hips rise at the same rate, with the bar coming off the floor. | Juggernaut | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | 1 Part Movement | |
It's going to be very important to be patient in the start. A lot of athletes tend to want to rush the start and jerk the bar off the floor, and when they do that sometimes they relax their arms and then pull and put their biceps in a compromised position. | Juggernaut | Video | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Be patient | |
Go down, get yourself in position, and pull. Don't stay down there for too long because your body position is gonna start shifting, shoulders can start twisting... you can see a lot of really weird things happen... all that extra energy down there is just burnt energy in a heightened state. You don't want to burn energy in that state. So get down there pull and be done with it. | Elite FTS | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | ||
If you listen to a bar when you go up to it, even if there's 135 on it, and you just slightly lift the bar, you're gonna hear a click. That's the bar clicking against the shaft, where the sleeve is.... You go up to the bar, you grab the bar, you [get tight] until you hear a click. Then when you hear the click, PULL... Tighten everything, and then pull. | Elite FTS | Video | Wait for the click. | Deadlift | Full tension | |
What we want to achieve with an ideal and optimal deadlift lockout is when you feel the bar reach the bottom of your knee, then the athlete will begin driving the hips through to meet the bar at lockout. So as the bar rises, the hip comes forward and they meet at the top. Rather than pulling the bar up and back into the hip, we want the bar to move in a straight line throughout the lift. | Juggernaut | Video | Drive your hips through. | Deadlift | Drive the hips | |
Remember to drive your hips as soon as it hits your knees. Don't wait. If you wait, you're gonna arch. | Elite FTS | Video | Drive your hips through. | Deadlift | Drive the hips | |
As she reaches down to grab the bar, if I was to come here and try and tickle her armpits, she's squeezing her tricep into her lat to block that... We're gonna squeeze the tricep into the lat and protect the armpit to create a rigid torso. Another way that you can think of this if you want to start from the top is to try and reach your arms down as long as you can. As I'm standing up right here and I push my arms down my side I'm not only elongated my arm, which is a great thing to do in the deadlift, I'm also engaging my lats very hard. I can reach down and maintain that same position. | Juggernaut | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
The second the hairs on your shin touch to the bar, that's the perfect lifting position...They always tell people to envision themselves in a leg press, and people always lean back into the heels because that's where all the power comes from on a leg press. Once you say that to people, they'll just lean back a couple inches and it just puts that center of gravity perfect. | Eddie Hall | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
You're gonna want to grab the bar as close to your shins as possible...just outside the knees. | Juggernaut | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Grip Width | |
[Wedge] your ass in underneath your shoulders. I always like to think of it as a wedge because you want your momentum going back because that's going to help you lean back and use leverage to lift the weight, while simultaneously getting glute drive... You lean back while squeezing your butt through and that's gonna wedge your hips under you. | Brendan Tietz | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
What you need to do is get down into position... you're going to grip the bar and literally lift up on it and get into a hip shoot so I'm lifting my hips back and what I'm thinking is I'm literally pulling up as I'm doing this. I'm not forward over it, I'm actually pulling up and then I sit back with it. So I'm taking that empty slack, I'm picking it up, and then I lean back. | Brendan Tietz | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
You always have to maintain contact with the bar on the shin, and where I really wedge my hips under the bar - I aggressively pull this bar into my shins and drag it up a little bit. I don't ramp it up my quads or my shins or anything but I really make sure it's always dug into my shins. You always want to ensure we have the best leverage and that bar is always maintaining position against the shins the entire way up. | Brendan Tietz | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Drag Bar Up the Body | |
In a conventional deadlift, the knees and hips should lock out at the same time and what we want to see is the knee action stays forward and never recedes until the bar needs to pass it. Whenever we see those knees recede early, that means the quads are shutting off...what you want to see is when you're pulling, those knees never shift back. They always stay forward until the bar clears and the hips and knees lock out at the same time. | Brendan Tietz | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | 1 Part Movement | |
When you get to [your knees] pull it in and squeeze your butt. So you're keeping [the bar] closer [to your body] so it changes how long you got to pull it and it doesn't keep your hips high. | Super Training | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
Push away, squeeze your ass. Because that's gonna meet the hips to the bar. | Szat Strength | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
I imagine that this bar here is completely bolted to the ground. That it's not going to be able to move. So what I think about is pulling myself through the floor, and this makes me keep keep pulling and keep my back as neutral as I can so I don't rush it. I used to think about lifting the weight... trying to actually pull it up... but [now] I think about putting myself down through the floor. | Omar Isuf | Video | Explode through the floor. | Deadlift | Push The World Away | |
One of the biggest changes I made in my deadlift was glute activation and the biggest, best thing ever for me was was this in particular: really really bring them through. When I say bring them through, you should be able to just hit your glutes - rock hard. Really really over-exaggeratedly squeeze them. Nice and rock hard there. | Omar Isuf | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
So it's hips back - now I have a slight bit of rounding in my back. Let's where I'm gonna use the bar. I'm really pulling myself into position... My spine is getting into a bit a more neutral position, I had a big pull through my hamstrings, through my glutes there, and that's where I want to pull from. Each and every time, I initiate the pull from that position. | Omar Isuf | Video | Grip and dip. | Deadlift | Wedge Yourself Under the Bar | |
One sign: if you're not engaging your glutes enough, you're probably going to know about it because you're not even really feeling them fire at all. | Omar Isuf | Video | Glutes! | Deadlift | ||
When I now grab the bar, I want to pull myself into the floor and I'm thinking about screwing my lats. I'm going to screw the bar slightly and you're going to feel the change in position with your lats. | Omar Isuf | Video | Elbows locked and loaded. | Deadlift | Protect armpit | |
...Make a window with your arms and the bar. Then you're gonna take your knees and put them through that window. That's gonna ensure that the bar stays close to you, that the bar is just lightly touching the shins - not dug into it at all- because we don't want to add friction, but it'll make sure that you're maintaining as close to vertical shin position as possible. Maybe a little bit of forward knee movement to ensure that you're able to use your legs your quads effectively to push away from the floor. | Juggernaut | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Vertical Shins | |
I really think about hinging at the hips, or pushing these hips back. I'm really
loading the glutes, loading the hammies, so that that muscle's going to lengthen. You're going to feel a bit of a pull
through there. | Omar Isuf | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings | |
From here, all you really need to do is stay tight during the descent... you need to make sure that you're going down at a pace that allows you to keep hamstrings tight. I'm not losing that tension in my lats... The easiest way I find to do that is to think about spreading the floor apart. Your feet shouldn't actually move, but if you do that it's going to naturally cause you to engage most of the muscles in your lower body... If that cue doesn't work for you, you might try something else. Some people like thinking of digging their heels backwards, and that helps them to engage their muscles. The really only thing that matters is that you are keeping tight. | Mind Pump | Video | Knees to shoulders. | Deadlift | Load Hamstrings |