 Hey everyone, Lance Goyke here. And today I wanna talk about flat back deadlifting and what it means. Now this is going to be a very detail oriented video because the positions that you adopt can be very subtle, can be almost invisible, depending on what kind of clothes you're wearing. I'm trying to wear a light shirt here so you can kind of see the tension in my back. I'll do it a couple of times to help you see it. Basically, most people have heard that when you're deadlift you're supposed to deadlift with a flat back, right? So the idea is I want my back to be my spine, spinal column to be kind of stacked on itself. And that's the idea is to help preserve the health of my intervertebral discs. Once I start really holding a lot of weight either in my hands or on my back and then I start moving my spine, then there seems to be research to support that causing problems over the long period of time. Maybe getting some bulging discs for example. So what I wanna talk about is the subtlety of the flatness. Now I heard that research years and years and years ago and so what I did was I just straightened everything out. I said chest up, don't look down, I might have even packed my chin like this and I just tried to really flatten with a lot of tension because you need some tension to compress all of your joints so that you can lift the weight and not collapse. Now if I deadlift just like this, my flatness removes my leg drive, okay? So this position probably doesn't look that bad. Wait, let me see. It doesn't look that bad, right? If somebody was doing this, I wouldn't stop them and say, oh my God, you gotta stop but I would try to fix it, right? And this is what the fixed position will look like, okay? Quite subtle, wrong, right, okay? Now if I hold this position, my back's not quite as flat, I can access my leg muscles. So in the first position, it's really hard to hold down there. In the first position here, my spinal erectors are really pulling up on my pelvis from the back and it tilts my hips forward, shutting off my hamstrings. The hamstrings are hip extensors. They are the prime movers of the deadlift, okay? Especially off the ground. So I need them, I need to be able to access them if I'm gonna deadlift heavy weights. But if I set up like this, I might be trying to stabilize here but I have nothing to actually supply force to actually pick the bar up off the ground. I have to rely on my back even further to do that motion. So if I hold right here and I round just a little bit, right? I'm not doing this, just a little bit, just a little bit if you've seen how I met your mother. So I got that, I can feel my legs burning right now. It's a little bit easier to talk but it's much harder to hold this position. So I do this and I start to get a little bit more tired. But as I drive and as I pick the weight back up, I can actually initiate with my hips. I don't remember what Lucas calls it but one of the guys that I work with always says he loves watching me deadlift because he loves to see my little shakes. And so when I deadlift, I am constantly fighting this that we talked about, this over flat back. And I'm constantly trying to find this actually flat back position that I'm looking for, this little bit better position that I'm looking for. And so that teeter-totter promotes some sort of quiver, I guess in my posture. And so when I start to pick the bar up, I'll start to shake a little bit. You see this a lot in a bunch of different movements when people really hammer home the position that their body hasn't wanted to do but I as a coach know it should be doing. They'll just sit there and they'll be like, oh my God, it's not that bad. I don't know why I can't control myself. And they just shake uncontrollably. Yeah, so it may be, you need to be looking for that. Last review, we're gonna do it one more time. So flat back, too flat, flat back, just the right amount of flat, okay? Now, identifying the setup is one thing, you also have to be able to maintain it throughout the entire lift. And for that I would recommend my bring the hips video because that will help you initiate with your hip muscles instead of with your shoulders.