 Ladies and gentlemen, man, today we're talking about my favorite lift. I think one of the best overall athletic movements. I think one of the best general movements for health, strength, and even hypertrophy. Despite what they may tell you, we're going to dive in how to deadlift healthy with good form and build some strength over time. Tap in. Let's see if this thing can get a thousand likes. Share it with your friends. Appreciate you. I'm Solid Mike. Let's deadlift. So in the sport of powerlifting, or even strongman, deadlifts are one of the big staples to train your entire posterior. That means that it trains multiple muscles. We're talking basically anything from the back of my heel to the back of my neck. It trains all of those muscles. And I get it. That's one of the knocks on hypertrophy, bodybuilders, building muscles, is that you're training so many muscles. Which one are you targeting and which one's going to grow from that? My argument would be if you're training hard enough, big enough weights, closest to failure, we're going to fatigue all of those muscle fibers and we can still hit what we need to target a certain muscle group afterwards. So if it's a glute day, there's no reason why we can't. Deadlift real heavy, it's a great hinge movement. Then go into hip thrust, then go into kick backs, lunges, step ups, etc. And work our way towards isolation like we would anything else. It is for the vast majority of people the lift that you can handle the most amount of weight from. So I think having that general strength actually transfers all the way down to allow you just to move more weight, which again will build more strength and muscle over time. Step number one, foot stance. We're going to go over the conventionals today, although a lot of these rules still apply to the sumo and we'll show you what a good sumo looks like with our one beautiful, strong, talented example, obi-loo. But I'm going to go over my ugly, weak, not so talented conventional. For most folks, we're going to start with slightly narrower than shoulder width. A lot of people talk about a shoulder width or wider, although that is a good athletic position when we're jumping, it might be wider than our shoulder width. But when we're talking about a deadlift and moving weight, range of motion matters and also where our hands go. So I'm going to suggest most folks go an inch or two within your hips, within your shoulders. To start for most people, it will depend on your length of your femurs, shins, and mobility, but a good place to start is chopping about two thirds or about half of your foot in half when you look straight down. So that bar with my vision, I've got about maybe three inches between my shins and the bar. That's going to leave enough room for me to drive my knees forward, get in contact with the bar, and still use knees and hamstrings to build. The first motion I like to set up is I like to start tension from the ground up. So all we're going to do is relax. We're going to bend over at the hips with a very slight knee bend. From here, we're going to grab the bar just outside, almost making contact with our legs. We're going to have our forearms and biceps just on the outside of our knee. We don't want to go too far in. It's going to cause too much resistance and mess up our bar path. You don't want to go too far out because that's going to take away some of our lats and also make that range of motion greater, make it harder to lift. So just on the inside of my legs, or excuse me, just on the outside of my legs. From here, I'm going to use the barbell. You can hear that tension in the barbell. And I'm going to use that tension to flatten my back, take a big breath into my gut, and the last rule is simple. We're going to keep our hips below our shoulders. Now, that's going to look different depending on how long your arms are, how long your torso is, and how long your legs are. But every single person can get their hips from a horizontal view or a side view lower than your shoulders. That's going to allow me to push my knees just slightly forward, making contact with the bar. Big breath and brace, flatten that back. I'm going to push my hips back towards that room. Whatever's behind you, I think about pushing my hips backwards, not downwards. Knees slightly forward, get contact with the bar with your shins, and then remain with that contact through the entire lift. Similar to the squat, we're going to have tension through our entire foot. There's a lot of old school that keeps talking about your heels, your heels, your heels. But I want my entire foot, each pad on my toes, the pad on my foot, and my heels pushing those toes across, getting as much surface area as I can with my feet on the ground, feeling that ground, and then getting my body weight slightly back. Again, just like the bench, I think there's a lot of misnomers and miscues about what you do with your scapula. A lot of people tend to squeeze their back tight. They don't know what to do, maybe they're shrugging up. Some people will shrug at the top. The truth is, even in standing, I like to think about having my arms as long as possible. You're almost doing a pec flex. You can flex your lats. If you're a newbie, it's a little bit harder, or even an intermediate, to feel your lats. But the biggest thing is I think about having my arms long like ropes. I even flex my tricep to keep safety from my bicep and bending your arms at all. You want the long straight arms, flex my tricep, flex my trap, and then I'm doing an old school pull down. I'm actually pulling that bar towards my body as I pull. So you get your stance, you bend over, nice big breath. Grab that bar just on the outside. We're going to get our hips below our shoulders from the start. A little bit of tension in your hamstrings. If there is no barbell, there should almost be enough tension that you would fall backwards. From there, long arms, flex my trice, and I pull that barbell into my body like that old school pull down. Then, with that tension, I think about going from zero to maybe 20, and then I floor it. Big mistake is I see a lot of people going zero to 100, and just like a powerful car, you're going to peel out and you're going to miss heavier weights. Latter weights might not make a difference, but a heavier weight to will. Now, last but not least for my hypertrophy, bros. Everyone's saying that RDL may be better because of the eccentric. There is no rule, there is no God-Jim-God telling us that we can't lower a deadlift with a slow concentric, or sorry, a slow eccentric. So, loading up the barbell, controlling it all the way, even tempoed, great for strength and working on your bar path, also great for time under tension if that's something you want to follow. And then same thing with the concentric. I turn it more into an RDL, I get some weight in my hammies, some tension. As I lower that thing, controlling the weight both ways. Abby is an elite, elite sumo deadlifter, so don't be frustrated if your lifts don't look the exact same as her. But when we're talking about the sumo, there's just a few changes. The obvious ones, our stance width is going to be outside of our hands now, our hands are going to go straight down. The goal of our width of our stance is to keep our knee over our mid-foot, which she does beautifully, allows us to use our quads slightly better. With your hands, depending on how you're built, you actually just want your hands to be in straight line to your shoulders. So your arms would make a straight line from the front, shoulders to the bar. The hinging, the bracing, where your hips are is all the same. Depending on how you're built, your hips may be a little bit lower than your shoulders than your conventional pull. But again, a lot of that depends on how you are built. Don't over force it. We call that wedging. Finding the tension in your hamstrings and glutes as we pull our torso towards the bar and set ourselves before the initial raise is we call wedging. And something that's the most common mistake is people over-wedging. And what they tend to do is they tend to actually just have a pelvic tilt, which actually isn't wedging. Cause one of the cues that's overused is getting your hips close to the bar. And if you don't have the proper body mechanics or body control, you'll try to get your hips underneath you. And now when I'm trying to unlock under heavy load, I'll have to curl my body. What we want to do is have again, just like our squat, we want to breathe in brace to be as rigid as we can, a straight tuna can from our hips to our shoulders. And when I wedge, it's simply wedging it all at once. It's not over-wedging. Over-wedging, good position. From there, same idea. Even more so, we don't want to go zero to 100 on a sumo. We now have a lot of patience off the ground. It is the least point of leverage to get the weight moving on a sumo. So typically a sumo deadlift will move slower off the ground, but it's all right. Get to 20, get to 30, get to 40 on your accelerator. Then you're going to hit the gas, lean back, keep that weight on your body and follow through. Now gripping the bar is a big piece, right? Because a lot of times our body is going to be stronger than what we can hold on to, especially if you're going double overhand. This is a very difficult grip the bar tends to roll. So you have two options. One, I actually think is highly overrated. It is very useful, but it's equal to the other. Both of these grips have a time and place, and depending on your comfortability and your overall grip strength, you can have success with either. There's been big, big weights pulled with both grips. The first one is a simple over-under or mixed grip. So you choose one hand, you're going to go underneath the barbell, and the other over. Same with the conventional, you're going to have it close to your body. Same with the sumo, you're going to have a straight line to the bar. Nothing else changes, except one's going to rotate inward. The second is called hook grip, where you're literally going to use your thumb as an anchor, and you're going to grab around the bar, and you're going to squeeze your thumb into that barbell. So you're not only grabbing the bar itself, but you're grabbing your thumb and almost using that as a mini strap tied into that bar. Depending on hand size, depending on finger length, mitts you got, hook may feel better for some than others. It is slightly painful, and it will take practice and time to get better at. What we're trying to get into is in this crevice, you can obviously see the calluses are going to lay in between these knuckles and these knuckles. So I want that bar to sit right in that crevice, and that both mixed grip, both straps, and both hook grip, that's going to allow you to actually grip the bar best. Our palms tend to be a little too meaty, so if we grab them in there, one, the vertical force will make it roll, and it has nothing to catch it now, and any wiggle, once you're near a max, if that bar wiggles a little bit in your hand, it's going to be very difficult to hold onto. Ladies and gentlemen, I know that's a basic overview, and sometimes people overcomplicate what it looks like. If you follow those rules, then we have to put in the reps, we have to put in the time, we have to put in the years, not weeks, not sessions, years to perfect our own form. Taking video, taking critique, and making small changes over a long period of time, your deadlift will be nice and smooth. Again, I think it's a great piece to build general strength, maybe the best. I think it's amazing for powerlifting. It builds your forearms, traps, erectors, back, lats, glutes, hands, everything you want. If I had to choose one piece to make it a hypertrophy piece, it'd probably be a great glute and hamstring movement. RDLs are also great, but that limits the amount of weight you can pull. Deadlifts you can pull the most amount of weight and we can control that eccentric and really overload our glutes and hands, as well as forearms. Appreciate you guys for checking in, man. New videos weekly, reels and shorts daily. Check it out, 3sb.co for all your apparel needs, caps, tees, some of the highest quality gym gear you can find. Goodcompanydiscord.com, I'm Solid Mike, man. We over me, be a part of something big in yourself, appreciate y'all.