 Hey everybody, welcome back. We are talking about a new exercise now. We're going to talk about the deadlift. Now the deadlift is considered another fundamental movement pattern. It's important to learn so that you're learning how to lift with your legs and not with your back. But it's very difficult to do correctly. We started with the squat. We did a hundred videos on the squat so that you can understand how to use that fundamental movement pattern. But that one's a little bit easier to get because everything's allowed to move. You just got to kind of be loosey-goosey. With the deadlift you have to have particular stiffness, but then still mobility in other joints. And some of that is true with the squat as well, but in the deadlift it's just a little bit more difficult. So what I want to do is I want to break up the deadlift into three movements. This is how I normally teach it, right? I got a lot of reps helping my old buddy Grant Gartis, Rufus Blackbone, out teaching other college kids how to do the Olympic lifts. To do the Olympic lifts, you need a lot of practice and you need a lot of work on the hip hinge. You might catch a clean in a full squat, but everything that gets the bar up off the ground is hip hinge related. It's deadlift related. And though Olympic lifters might not lift the same way, they're still understanding how to hinge at the hip. So what we're going to start with, the way that I've found works the best, is we're going to start from the top down, from the top of the movement and work our way down. We're going to start from first taking a bow and then we're going to work all the way down to grabbing the bar at the ground. And I don't really do top down. I do actually top bottom and then middle and you'll see this. So this is video number one. First, if I'm teaching someone how to deadlift, I'm going to try to make them as successful as I can. So one thing to note is not too much weight. Maybe 24 kilos on a kettlebell. I usually start people with a kettlebell because they only get so heavy in most gyms. And we're just working what's called the Romanian deadlift or the RDL position. So we're learning how to take a bow. I'm going to turn kind of quarter turn here and we're going to pretend like I'm holding the weight. You don't really need even a weight to drive this pattern. But generally the weight is going to be pulling your arms down and you're just going to try to push your butt back toward the wall behind you and back up. Okay, so that's just the general rep. What do we see when we do this? Well, lots of times people will finish like this and they're leaning back way too far. I'm not even exaggerating. This is actually what it looks like. So what you need to learn how to do is find your right spinal position. We need to find something that's a little bit more neutral, a little bit more in the middle area. And so if somebody's leaning back at the top like this, the first thing I'm trying to do is I'm saying, okay, I want you to exhale and tuck your tailbone between your legs. Okay, just like that. And I feel the tension come out of my back already. I feel my heels sink into the ground and I might ask you, hey, after you tuck that tail, do you feel your heels more in the ground? And then they'll think and 90% of the time they'll say, yeah, actually. And I say, okay, good, hang on to that while you're doing this bow. Okay, so I got my heels. Well, let's say we're going to start from step one. I'm arched too much. Exhale, tuck my hips. Oh, that's easy. Okay, I feel my heels. We're going to hang on to this flat like a board and push our butt back just like that. Okay, so that's kind of, we're going to quickly run through common faults. Biggest one is people are too arched at the top. Second one, people arch more as they come down and they try to keep their chest up. These people have often been training significantly throughout their lives, maybe in a sports, collegiate, high school, whatever setting. What you're going to need to break is the mold that they've made, right? So they think they need to keep their chest up. And that's what's going to give them their tightness. But as we'll see in the hopefully 100 videos to come on the deadlift, when I do that, I throw everything else out of position and I can't access the muscles that I need to access. So doing this stretches my hamstrings, but it makes it harder for me to drive with them actively. I can feel them because they're stretching, but I can't push with them. So we have to make sure that as you bow, you're keeping that rigid back position. So we've set with the tuck. That's the same cue that I'll start here. Even if they look okay at the top, but then they arch here, I'm going to say set with the tuck, find your heels. Okay. And if you bend over and you stick your butt out more, I know you've lost your heels because I know those mechanics are pushing you forward. You're going to need to maintain those heels and it might not happen right away. Lots of cues happen right away and they're very satisfying because you can clearly see this is what I was doing. I changed this and now this feels better. But with the heels, you might get two out of 10 reps. So you need to work on it. Okay. And as a coach, I'm just going to keep reminding you again, the deadlift is way harder to learn than the squat. So tuck, bend. Cool. Now I haven't lost my position. I didn't arch up. I have my heels in the ground and I'm starting to feel my hamstrings and that's the next cue that we might want to hang on to. Third thing. So we've talked about arching too much at the top. That was number one. We've talked about arching too much at the bottom. That was number two. They're just trying to feel more, right? Number three is I have a good eccentric. I have a good lowering, but then I lose it on the way up. Okay. And so the principles are the same. I'm going to use very similar cues, but in the way that I describe it to you, the lifter, it's going to be a little bit different. So you might understand this position here, but you don't understand driving with your legs. And so what I like to say is I want you to come up really slowly because if you go too quick, you're just going to resort to what you know. Come up really slowly and keep pushing through your heels. If you lose them, stop, pause, freeze, come back down, try it again. Any variation of that. So the key here is to slow down because otherwise you don't feel it. And then the key after that is to stay aware of it. You're not going to be lifting any heavy weights while you're trying to learn this pattern. And that's kind of by design because once you, when you're starting, you don't know how to lift safely. The deadlift can be kind of precarious for back health and stuff. So we need to limit you, make sure we're retraining everything, and then build upon that. And outside of just being safe, it's easier to learn if you have less going on, less weight to hold on to. So we talked about arching too much at the top. We talked about arching too much at the bottom. We talked about losing your middle position and arching on the way up. Now last one, fourth. So somebody who comes in and they've never deadlifted in their life. These people are very prone to rounding. And so they're going to try to lift with their back and they're not going to load their legs because loading their legs is uncomfortable. Maybe they've done it before, maybe that you've had a couple sessions, maybe you only squatted on your first session and you're really sore back there and you're trying to avoid it. All of those things can come into play here. But if you see someone rounding their back or if you are the person rounding your back when you're trying to deadlift, I've found it helpful to picture like you have a, you can either picture or actually put a PVC pipe on your back or just picture yourself. I like to say it's like you're holding a plank while you bend over. Okay. And so if I'm, if I feel the tension in my back, then I know it's not quite right. If I feel only in my hamstrings and my back feels kind of relaxed, then I have a better indication that it's going well. Another thing I like to do if somebody's rounding their back when they bend over, I will line, line like a bench up right here in front of you and use that to block your knees. And I'll say, okay, you got to kind of bend over that. That usually fixes a weight management when you're shifting forward or backward. It may not help for rounding the back. So next cue that I might try as I bend over, I reach towards the wall. And so what I'll say is take this butt, push it to the back wall, take your hands and reach toward the front wall. Okay. And that kind of reflexively turns on the abdominals that you need to control this movement. So we talked arching too much at the top. We talked arching too much at the bottom. We talked arching on the way up, not getting a good leg drive. And then we talked rounding your back throughout the movement. All these things are contingent on the positions that you find. So if you don't know how to stand up top here with your hips underneath you, you're not going to be able to find it on the deadlift. So take the weight down, work on this cue. Sometimes you can do some more remedial exercises. Maybe you do something like a cat, camel, cow, whatever they call it these days. You can do something like this and say, oh, that's what I mean by tucking my hips. Okay. So do that during your deadlift. Do that at the top of your deadlift. And sometimes those positions in other organizations or other arrangements helps you translate into the big bang exercise that is the deadlift. So that is learning the deadlift part one starting from the top.