 Hey everyone, this is Lance Coyke and today I want to start a series on how to deadlift safely without hurting your back. Now basically what I'm looking for is when I do my deadlifting and when I do any sort of hip-hinging movement, maybe it's a Romanian deadlift, maybe it's a single leg deadlift, maybe it's a deadlift with the bar on the ground, maybe it's a kettlebell deadlift, maybe it's a trap bar deadlift, all these things. I need to make sure that my back stays straight. So what we've seen in research from Dr. Stuart McGill, great mustache. That's great. You got to look it up. You got to Google it. So what we've heard is that the spine only takes so much loaded flexion and extension. It only takes so much movement under loads. And so if I am bending over, and I think Dr. McGill might disagree with me, if I'm bending over this is probably okay, but if I bend over with a lot of weight and I try to jerk the weight up off the ground as you'll see in many different gyms, I'm not really doing anything good for my back. I might be lifting more weight and if that's your only goal, then you now understand the risks and rewards of what you're doing. But what I want to talk about is figuring out how to maintain this neutral spinal position. And so first what we're going to talk about is not arching your back at the top. Easiest way to do this is you start by learning the hip hinge pattern, the Romanian deadlift maybe. So if I hold a kettlebell and it comes straight down like this, the whole lift just looks like this. Okay, now if I'm doing it wrong, I'm probably just going to hold it like this. And now my hips are tilted forward and my back is, or my shoulders are, or my chest is up, my shoulders are back, stuff like this. You might hear those as cues to fix your deadlift, but I think that they actually mess people up more than they help people. So I try to avoid those. Basically, if I'm arching at the top, I got to figure out how to not arch. I got to figure out how to get my hips underneath me. I like to start with the hips because oftentimes that's going to fix what's happening up here. If it doesn't, we can get into that later. But with the with the hip position, that's generally going to get the biggest bang for your buck. And so first thing I'm going to try is just a quick cue. I want you to tuck your tail between your legs. And now I know exactly what I mean by that. And so I can do it really quickly. And it's easy enough for me. If somebody doesn't get that, I might try it a couple times. I might say, I want you to exhale, push through your heels and tuck your tail between your legs. Or I might say, I want you to pretend like you're wearing a belt buckle and bring or belt and bring your belt buckle into your belly button. Okay. Or I might say, I want you to force your stomach into your low back. All of those things help us turn on the maybe smaller, but very important abdominal muscles that help us control the position of our pelvic bones, which dictates how our legs are working and whether or not we're able to use the leg muscles, or whether we have to rely on the back muscles to be doing stuff. So don't arch at the top. First cue, try to tuck it. If that doesn't work, what I'm usually going straight to is we lay on the ground and you're going to learn how to do a hip tuck. So oftentimes I'll just do this on the ground and it'll work fine. And I say, okay, what I want you to do is just pick your tailbone up off the ground. And again, I know what I'm doing. So this is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the back to round down. I'm looking for the tailbone to come up. I'm not looking for a hip bridge. That's not what we're doing here, but that's often what I'm going to get. So when I say, I just want you to lift your tailbone up off the ground. People do this. And I say, okay, that's really good, but I'm not trying to set any world records. So put your low back on the ground and I want you to keep it on the ground and only pick your tailbone up. And then they're like, oh, okay, I kind of get that. And sometimes they'll still come up a little too high. I say, that's pretty good. Come down a little bit lower. Or sometimes they air on the other side and they don't really tilt too much. They might get a little bit of pressure through their heels in the ground and a little bit of tailbone lift, but not quite enough. Because what I'm trying to get is I'm trying to get a little bit of pressure through your hamstrings. So as you tuck your hips, you've got to push through there and hang on to it. Okay. So I might actually say, that's pretty good. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more, just a little bit more depending on how much they do. But this is about the angle that I'm looking for. You should feel back pressure in the ground, but not back tension of being on. Okay. And that's kind of an important distinction, at least if you're coaching other people for you to understand. So what I'll say is, hey, hold on to that. Okay. That's pretty good. Now, do you know what a bridge is? So I want you to bridge your hips up and then we can go like this. And I'll say, okay, come back down. Did you lose your position? Yeah, I kind of did. Okay. So push your back back down, pick your tailbone back down. Do you have your hamstrings? Good. Go. And we're going to hang onto that. And now keep it on the way down. Oh yeah. Okay. Now I feel them. Yeah, I feel them a lot. And I feel my glutes a lot too. So I like to use this laying on your back thing for fixing stuff. If this doesn't work, elevate your feet onto a bench and do the same kind of hip tuck motion. Then I will say, okay, you remember what I was saying about tuck your tailbone between your legs at the top of your deadlift? What I need now is I need you to do this position at the top of your deadlift. Try it out. And so they'll come back and they'll say, oh yeah, I can feel it now. I can feel it now. And usually just doing that a couple of times loosens you up and that directly addresses the limiting factor for you right now at this point. The limiting factor for this person is not being able to keep their hips underneath them, not being able to finish with their hamstrings and with their glute muscles and instead relying on their back muscles and not finding the right position. So if we figure out how to find the right position here on the ground, then I can say, okay, take that, that one little tiny section of your body. All we're doing is L1 to the coccyx. This is the only thing that we're working on. Take that, which you now know how to do and you've shown me you know how to do, take that into a more complicated movement like the top of a deadlift and figure out how to find it there. To be blunt, that works for pretty much everyone. So try that. Do we want to talk about anything else? If you're not getting that, you might want to try more hip, bridgey things to feel more glutes. You might want to try throwing in a little exhale and reach forward at the top. That little forward shift of the weight with your hands reaching forward kind of helps cue some glute action and some hamstring action. But honestly, I'm doing this on the ground and then I'm saying, okay, figure it out. If you can't quite get it or if it's not quite where I want it, if you still have a little bit of that tip forward, then we may need more help with it. So we may need to take this to another degree. And so I'm taking this exercise that you've learned your hip movement in and I'm saying, okay, here at the top of this deadlift, you're doing it really well. You're just not doing it quite enough. So what I want you to do is try to keep that tuck, maybe even increase it. And then that's where we can throw in that exhale. I want you to exhale all the air out. Do you feel more of your abs? Do you feel more of your heels in the ground? And they'll say, yeah, okay, hold that, take a breath in, do that again. Oh yeah, now I feel them even more. Okay, now reach your hands forward. Okay, now I feel more abs and more heels, more hamstrings. Sorry, I was out of breath. And we can take that and that kind of amplifies what they're feeling in it. It steers that, you know, that doesn't look like a normal deadlift, right? I don't need you to deadlift that way. But it serves as a good cue for learning how to finish the top of the deadlift. There was one more thing I wanted to talk about. So we got the tuck and we got this thing. We're trying to find this. Oh yeah. So if someone is really stubborn, sometimes they might have a soft tissue restriction. It's not just the control of your joints. It's that you need more flexibility. And sometimes people have really stiff backs of their hips, stiff posterior hip capsules, and they might need some help. So I got to find this beautiful candle or something like that. And I got to have you lay back down on this and do your little hip lift thingy and hang on to that. And now I'm going to give you the candle. And I'm going to say hold on to that and squeeze it. So now we get a little bit of adductor tone to help position the hips further. What you'll notice, these people who can't just cue this tilting, they don't have good, for you coaches out there, they don't have good frontal plane control of this stuff. So they need to find a way not just to tilt the hips back, but also how to tilt them outwards, not just to tilt the hips back, but also how to tilt them outwards. And so this, these adductors help pull the bottom part of your pelvic bones open. And so I'm just going to say, you just sit here and you can even, you can do your bridges. You're not going to be able to come up as high because you steal some hip motion by doing this. And especially for these people, because you're trying to stretch the things that are stretching already. I do feel my, my adductors though, and I do feel my hamstrings still. So that's good. So then I'm just going to have you do a bunch of those. And it's, it should burn a lot. You should feel like you're doing something. If you don't, you need to be more particular about the cue. You need to tilt harder. You need to squeeze harder, or you need to do them more sequentially. Oftentimes if you don't get the tilt and you squeeze too early, you're only going to get hip flexor. You're not going to get the right kind of adductor, right? You're not going to get the hamstrings still. So you got to get this tilt first and then you squeeze. And that helps me get my position. So that at that point, when you have mobility restrictions like that, it's not necessarily a motor control issue. There is some soft tissue stuff. So that might not change a whole lot right away. You should notice a little bit the first time you do it. If you do hammer it correctly. But that's going to be something that you're going to want to stick into your program. Maybe even pair it with your deadlift while you're learning the deadlift so that you can unlock some of the mobility that you need and continue to train that right hip position that we were talking about. Remember bringing the bottom of the pelvis open a little bit more. So, I bet you thought that was easier than it is. This is how to deadlift safely without hurting your back. And we talked about don't arch at the top. We talked about not arching at the top. So hopefully you found some cues that's going to work for you. Feel free to give them a shot and if you don't have anything or if you want to leave your own cue in the comments below, go ahead.