 Exercise number six in our eight exercise progression to activating your glutes during the deadlift. We did a lot of stuff on the ground on those first five exercises. Number six now, we're increasing the complexity, the motor pattern complexity of the movement. So now there's more gravity to oppose. I have fewer points of contact on the ground and we're gonna start doing movements that look a lot more like deadlifting. Number six is the single leg RDL. I should have practiced a couple of these because I know I'm gonna fall on camera, but it's okay. We're learning here. Okay, so single leg RDL. RDL means Romanian deadlift. That's just the top half of a deadlift. Okay, so as I come down here, I get a little bit of a stretch and I'm pushing through my foot. That makes sure I'm still activating this stuff here. Now, why is this important? How does this relate to what we've done already? If I reach this foot back and arch my low back, I turn my back on, I feel it in my back, but I don't feel it in my legs so much. I might feel it in the front of my leg, but I don't feel it in the back of my leg. So instead of arching my back like this, I need to round my back a little bit more. Seems counterintuitive. Not what people say often, but often people don't understand biomechanics either. So that was a little aggressive. I apologize. You saw part of my unfilteredness. So round the low back so that the hamstring, so that the glute is in a good position to work. And now I'm gonna take that and I'm going to make sure I'm maintaining it throughout this movement. So there's two main components to this. One, I gotta get the spine position. And we're talking about that with the round back thing throughout the movement. And two, I need to initiate with my hips, okay? I don't want to, if you've watched my video on Bring the Hips, it's probably the most important video I've ever made. Maybe I should link to it if I remember, I will. I need to initiate with the hips. I need to bring the hips forward and then the body stands up. I don't want to initiate with my shoulders up because that's a good way to cue my back to turn on. So what this looks like, I'm not here, I'm gonna set up with an exhale and just round my low back. Yes, round my low back. That's actually what I want. That lets me, I feel my glute already. I feel my heel in the ground a lot more. Good, I know what I got. Okay, so I'm gonna hang on to that as I bend over, making sure not to lose it. If I do lose it, I'm gonna just check at the bottom, okay? I can put my foot on the couch while I sit here and take inventory. Did I lose it? Oh yeah, I did lose it, so let's find it again. Okay, and we're gonna try that again. I'm just gonna say I gotta get to that position. And we're there. Now, to come back up, I initiate with the hips. I bring the hips forward like this. Bam, keeping the heel, not shifting my weight forward onto my toes like this. I know it seems kind of subtle. I might just keep my foot kind of normal here. It seems kind of subtle, but I feel a lot of calf when I shift my weight forward and I start to feel a little bit of front of hip. Instead, I want to, oh, now my foot is not nearly as tired and I feel my heel in the ground, yes. And I feel my glute, there it is. Good, so I wanna hang on to this while I do all my reps. Got a nice low back position and then I bring the hips forward. What does it look like if I don't bring the hips forward? Maybe my whole lowering is really good and then I do this to stand up, okay? You see that makes me lose my balance even. Let's do that again. Shoulders first, like this. Ooh, shoulders first. What that's doing is it's initiating with my low back. What that does is it actually decreases some of the feedback that I get in my foot. My foot's my main point of instability for me, so I lose my balance really quickly when I do that. Instead, we gotta maintain that little rounded low back. I know I'm being very repetitive on this. This is a complicated one and if you can get this, it sets you up for success in a lot of other things. So we're activating the glutes. Now, why did we do the single leg before we did a normal deadlift? The single leg gives me some more freedom, okay? It's easier to overemphasize maybe the rounding of the back on one side than it is to overcome the tension on both sides while I'm doing this. So we learned the single leg variation first and then we're gonna get into deadlifting or normal deadlifting. There are two things at play here. One, there's that, that just general glute activity as you're looking at me from the side. Can I get it here? And there I feel a great squeeze. And then, drum roll please. We turn around and we look at this from behind. So I could film myself from behind and if I'm doing this, I'm not getting all the glute that I could be getting. I can use the single leg variation to kind of cheat because in a deadlift I'm not gonna do this but in the single leg variation, I'm gonna hike the opposite hip up, keep my foot flat on the ground and now there it is. I can feel a little bit more of this outside glute, this deeper glute, okay? And that's gonna just help me find the glute at the top of this lift. So same idea, I keep my low back rounded. I make sure I have it at the bottom, check, bring the hips forward to stand up and then at the very end, I don't wanna finish like this. I wanna finish with this hip a little bit more height. Where people go wrong here, oftentimes you start to list the upper body this way when you hike this hip up. I need the upper body to stay loosey-goosey so that left shoulder comes down when I get to the top, okay? That's just something that I usually visually cue or I might just say, bring your left shoulder down too. If you don't get it, sometimes you're just tight because you're trying to learn a new movement and it's okay, just do a couple reps and it looks better. If not, film yourself, try to find another way to do it. If it's still not working, go back to the single leg variation. Maybe try that hip hike in the single leg, not variation, single leg glute bridge that we did previously. That can help you start to learn that motion. I know this is a lot. It's because it's a complicated exercise and there's plenty of places for it to go wrong but that's why it's in here because I need to challenge you now. I need to get you on your feet. I need to teach you how to extend your hip without using your back so that your glutes turn on.