 Hey everybody! If you watched my video yesterday about bringing the hips, then you notice I floated this idea of getting your position first and then driving the right motion. And that's kind of the point I want to elaborate on today. First and foremost, you need to have the position because if you can't find the positions, then the motion doesn't matter because you're starting wrong already. The positions are what gets you the correct starting point or the correct setup. And so positions to me in a deadlift are am I keeping my body weight on my feet pretty dispersed, evenly dispersed? I'm not biasing myself out on the outsides of my feet, insides of my feet, backboards, forwards, anything like that. And then do I have a good back position? And that's kind of the biggest change there. I can get my weight under control. My feet can be flat, but I can be totally rounded out in my back. And that's just not going to be a healthy long-term deadlifting solution. So we have to get that back position second. So at first is your body weight balance position, and then second is your spinal position. And then third is it's a little bit more nitpicky, but it's just that starting position. Where can I get my joint angles at? So if I have control of my body weight, my back is set, then I don't want to be squatting. I don't want to be upright like this, and I don't want to be pitched over too too much like this because I'm going to lose some of my leverage. There's a more optimal middle ground for me to find. Third, the probably the most messed up position is the knee position, the RDL. And that's why I like to start teaching from the top down. I'd like to start with the RDL and then move down into the entire exercise, the entire deadlift. When I'm at my knee, my shins need to be vertical. Maybe it'd be helpful if I showed you my shins. I can't be here. I got to be here. Okay. That's the only way to get your hamstrings to be recruited during this entire exercise, right? You might be able to find some of it, but you're also going to place a lot of tension on the back if you're not getting that position. What this does for us is when we deadlift and we pick the bar up, we get the knees out of the way so that we can maintain good leverage, keep the bar close to you because as the bar gets further away from you, it feels heavier. The torque increases because the moment arm increases away from your body. And that's why picking up something when you have to reach really far away to pick it up makes it so much heavier, makes it so much more difficult, and makes it easier for you to hurt your back in just daily activities. So we've got a one, get body weight position. Two, what was the other one? Spinal position, back position. Three, we've got to get that starting position. Four, we've got to get a good knee position. And then five, the final one, we have to get a good lockout position. If you don't know how to lock out without extending your back like this, then you're going to need to learn what that position is supposed to be like before you can imagine that you're just going to naturally get it during your deadlift. And maybe some people will just get it naturally. That's why I like to save most of my cues until someone has proven that they need them. I'm not going to walk you through all five of these steps. If I'm first teaching you the deadlift, I'm just going to say, hey, bend over, pick that bar up. And if they do it with a round back, I'm going to fix the back. And if they do it with their weight shifting forward, I'm going to shift the weight back. And I'm going to go step by step by step and make sure that they have these positions before we start to learn or before we start to worry about the motions. And by motions, I mean that transition zone between positions. So if I have a good starting position and then I know what the right knee position is, but I don't get it. Let me give you an example. So you can do an RDL really, really well and you get a really good knee position. You turn on those hamstrings. You can get a good starting position as well from the bottom. But when you're picking the bar up, you don't hit that knee position. That's because you have this motion deficit. You don't know where to drive from. And so if I'm first setting you up in that bottom position, I'm going to then have to teach you how to leg drive from the bottom and stop at the knee. I like to teach the freeze. I like to teach the pausing. I like to teach the stopping because it brings awareness to these positions for you. And so you might know how to do this knee position, how to find those hamstrings from the top down. But eventually I need you to be able to find it from the bottom up. And so you take these positions and then you merge them together. You may need different contexts. You might learn it with a kettlebell and then try it with a barbell and it's totally wrong. You might master it with a kettlebell and then you can't do it with a barbell. Or you might master it with a barbell and then you can't do it when you put more weight on. All of these things are just layering on different experiences that you need to learn. And so what you need to do is be particular about the details and just continue practicing.