 Hi, I'm Lance Goyke and welcome to my living room. We're gonna talk about the deadlift and specifically just the bottom position that you start in for the deadlift. And even more specifically, I wanna talk about what are the knees doing? We're gonna look at the knee joint and try to figure out what is okay and what is not okay. So first we need to identify the type of deadlift that we're doing. So we're gonna say that we're doing a barbell deadlift, just a normal, trying to be optimal for my leverage and lift the most weight kind of deadlift. When I get to the bottom here, generally something like this is good, okay? I'm looking to optimize my leverage here so that I don't get too pitched over like this. You're not gonna see anybody who's really, really strong deadlifting with their knees locked out like this because there's just no tension through the thigh bone and through the tibia, right? I need to push those forces all the way through my bone because they handle them really well. Conversely, should I bend my knees a lot like this? And that poses its own problem. So if I have a bar, the bar has to come up and it has to clear my knees. So when I get to the knee, my principle is the shin should be vertical. The knee needs to be out of the way. So I can start here if I want, but I need to make sure that as I push up, my knees get out of the way, okay? And I can still load my legs for a deadlift this way with this amount of knee bend. I think it's a little bit more difficult, especially when you have a barbell to do it that way. Unless I start to load things more like an Olympic lift where I am then going to, I need a lot of mobility and I need to then bend my knees again. It tends to work out pretty well that way. Most people, when I'm teaching them though, I'm not gonna let them get here and I'm not gonna let them get here, right? End range of motion is generally not what we wanna stick with. We wanna find somewhere in the middle and we wanna learn to be comfortable there. So instead of here, again, maybe something like this is a little bit more optimal. Somebody who's really flexible, they can probably get away with a mostly vertical shin and they can still load their hamstrings on the initiation. I kinda like a slight knee bend. I think you get a little bit more power that way and I think you can initiate with your quads to break the ground. You're gonna feel a lot of hamstring and a lot of hip, because that's what's opposing most of the weight but you can still feel a lot of quad during the deadlift because that's what initiates things and that's what starts to push you away from the ground and that's what starts to build your momentum, right? So I know this is not the, this is the way to do it, kind of perfect video that everyone's looking for but I will say if you're flexible, you can try to keep more of a vertical shin. If you don't have quite as much and you find yourself pretty comfortable here, you feel like your ankles are pretty mobile, you can start with a little bit more knee bend. Now let's quickly go over some other variations. So let's just do one, for example. So the trap bar deadlift is the other major lifting variation that I'm gonna do and so for this one, for the trap bar, I don't have to clear my knee, right? My knee doesn't have to come out of the way. Now, should I still push my knees, kind of back into this position once my hands are about knee level as I'm lifting with the trap bar? I would say, yeah, ideally you do want that. I know that the trap bar distributes the load a little bit differently because it's kind of spread around you rather than sitting in front of you. But I think if you don't use this to train the optimal leg drive off the ground, you're never gonna get to a barbell variation and you're never gonna kind of translate this picking things up motion into something that works for the rest of our lives. So when you pick up a box, boxes aren't hexagonal and sit around you, right? And you don't often have two little handles right here that you can pick stuff up. But if I have a box and I need to get down like this, the box is in front of me, right? So I need to oppose the tilting forward that it's trying to do to me. I need to be able to maintain my back position. Same thing with like moving furniture, right? It's always awkward. So there are reasons to do both variations. I would still with either one of them try to make sure you're loading your hamstrings. Again, I've talked about this in previous videos, but the hamstrings are kind of the key here. If I can find and feel them, I know you're doing pretty well. That's all I got for you. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.