 The technique series is brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching. Did you know that you can get a 100% free form check from one of our expert strength coaches? Seriously, absolutely 100% free. No credit card needed, no questions asked. Just go to barbelllogic.com slash technique and sign up for the free Barbell Logic experience now. Do that right now and then enjoy the show. Barbell Logic Rewind. Welcome to the Barbell Logic Podcast. I am Scott Hambrick and I'm with Matt Reynolds and we're going to do another one of these in our series about the big cues. We've done the master cue and the mid-foot cue. We've done the knees out cue and today we're going to talk about push the floor. Matt Reynolds' favorite, I think, in mine. Yeah, yeah. So in the deadlift, Matt will say and I will say push the floor away, push your feet through the floor, push the earth away. What other variants of that cue have you heard? Leg press, leg press the floor away. You're right. Well, I think the first thing that we need to talk about is what's the difference between a push and a pull. And the answer is, there is no such thing as a push or a pull, right? Oh, well, okay, I see what you're saying. Get yourself where I'm going. From an actual biomechanic standpoint, nothing is a push or a pull. Muscles just contract. They just get shorter or relax. They just get shorter, right? They just, they get shorter. Here's where I was going with that. We often call the deadlift a pull colloquially, right? Yeah, so I'm going to, yeah, I'm going there. So the thing that is important to understand it in our how to deadlift video on the Barbiologic YouTube channel, I make the comment that the deadlift isn't a pull, it's a push. So here I am saying that there is no such thing. And that's true, right? And there are times that we want our clients or even ourselves to consider or to think about something in a way that might not be exactly scientifically, physically, biomechanically true, but it still helps us to do it the right way. So we use cues all the time. Like we've talked about before, the cue of like, get back on your heels. We don't actually want people to get back on their heels. We want them balanced over the midfoot. But if they're constantly on their toes, constantly on their toes, constantly on their toes, then often we'll give them an overcorrection cue, which is not exactly what we want them to do, but we're just trying to get them to move rightly. So when I say that we consider the deadlift a push and not a pull, it's because it often fixes many things that are wrong at the beginning of a deadlift for people. Yeah, to call it a push is a cue that makes people behave correctly and move properly. Yeah, absolutely. So you might want to go back to our podcast about, you know, about cues, like what is a cue, right? And the cue is the thing that we use to get the lifter to move the way we want them to move. And so sometimes we can say things that are factually incorrect, but it means something to our lifter and gets them to do the right thing and move the right way. So if the person is pulling on the bar in the deadlift, what do you see them doing? Yeah, so let me just address the cue really fast too, because that was good. It's an important point. So the cue is something that we use that's more of a reminder or a trigger of something that's already been taught. This isn't the teaching method, right? So we're saying a thing that requires very little thought by the lifter in order to just get them to perform the movement correctly. So push the floor away or leg press the floor. It's something that anybody who's ever been on a leg press knows what that feels like. Your hips are static and you make the plate move that your feet are against probably. If you know, most leg presses are set up that way. And so what I see when people are not pushing the floor away is that they start to pull and their hips start to extend before their knees extend. And in a deadlift, we actually want knee extension to initiate the movement. We want to be able to use our most muscle mass. And so our knees are bent a little bit. Our hips are bent a lot. Our back is usually very horizontal in a deadlift at the start position, right? And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to utilize my quadriceps at knee extension to initiate the movement for a deadlift. The vast majority of people, we see the two ends of the spectrum look like this. People will begin to extend their knees hard and early and the bar doesn't move. That's a problem. We see this all the time. The hips pop up. The knees get straighter, but the bar doesn't come off the floor. That's a problem. Now I have body movement that occurred that didn't transfer into the barbell. And the other side of that is they keep their knees bent. The Rachel Reynolds problem. My wife does this. She pulls the bar off the ground and her back immediately starts to become more vertical and her hips start to open, but her knees stay closed just as close as they were when the bar was still on the ground. Well, that's also a problem because now I'm not utilizing my... So both fail to utilize the quads to initiate the movement. The quads being the knee extenders. Right? Right. Knee extension should contribute to the barbell moving. Boom. Wait a minute. Stop. So contribute. You're right, but we want to make sure that you're using both the quads and the hip extensors off the floor. That's right. Because once it's off the floor, you really can't use the quads that much. They don't help very much. And so if you've got a deadlift that's stuck on the floor, if you're not failing just below the knee, this is probably your problem. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And to understand that both ends of the spectrum fail to utilize the knee extension or the quads properly. So the quads are either extending and the bar doesn't move or the bar moves and the quads and the knees don't extend. Both problems. Right? Similar issues, but the way we cue it are completely different. So if you're someone who is pulling the bar off the floor, meaning that their hips start to open and the back becomes more vertical before the knees extend at all, then that's a problem when we say push the floor away. Also, if you're a person who tries to arm pull a bar, if you yank on the bar with your arms and your shoulders shrug or your elbows bend, that's a problem. Like the arms and the shoulders do nothing in a deadlift. There are two pieces of rope with hooks on the end of the cube by the way, right? So we think about pushing the floor away. And as I push the floor away, the bar must move. I can't push the floor away and have my hips go up and the bar stay on the ground because it didn't contribute to the movement of the bar. And that's how I want the bar to be initiated. So that's a cue that I use to get them to start the deadlift correctly. Yeah, it makes sense. And we actually say that in our changing progression too, right? We're like, hey, walk up to the bar one inch away. Now I'll hump over, grab the bar. Step three, put your shins against the bar. Step four, pull your chest up. Step five, push the floor away and drag the bar up your legs. That's correct. So if you're out there and you're not thinking of pushing the floor away and you're a new lifter, just do that. Like don't worry about all this stuff. Like Matt just said about knee and hip extension and all that stuff. Push the floor away. Your arms are cables and set your back and push the floor away. And chances are you're going to deadlift properly. It seems to be the lift that takes the least technical expertise as long as their head's in the right place. My arms are cables. I'm pushing the floor away. I'm pushing my feet through the floor. It's a standing leg press. I'm going to push the earth away. All of those things will find you standing up with the bar over your midfoot. That's right. Now let's talk about what happens if you do that correct and what it looks like immediately after. Just right. Because there was also a tremendous difference between push the floor away on a deadlift and push the floor away on a clean. These are two different pulls. Pushes. Two different whatever, right? So on a deadlift and on a clean, the initial movement of the barbell is attributed primarily to some knee extension. The knee extension gets the bar off the floor. That's the first half inch. That's the first half inch. Literally, it's that little, it's nothing. It's very little. It literally gets the weight off the floor. How much off the floor? Not much. Almost none. Yeah, so I think all of us have experienced a deadlift that you walked up to and you're like, man, I got this. And then it was JB welded the floor. And you're like, did I misload the bar? No. If your programming was correct and you loaded the bar properly, you probably had a mechanical problem that took the quad out of it in that first half inch. It felt like it was glued down. That's correct. And so if the hips pop up, it feels like it's glued down in the, I'm pushing the floor away and the knees extending the hips pop up. The shoulders also jump forward. They lurch forward. When the hips pop up, the shoulders go forward. These are all problems. If I can get the bar to come off the ground, that half inch, one inch with my knee extension, in a deadlift at that point, my hips start to extend and my back does start becoming more vertical. So the two cues that I tend to use to get people to deadlift correctly after the five step setup that you just described is to start by pushing the floor away. And the second you feel the weight come off the bar, I'm going to try to get my shoulders behind the bar. Now, when do the shoulders come behind the bar on a deadlift? We're at the very top, the very last thing. At literally at the very top. So this is another- The last thing that happens. Literally the last thing that happens. So this is another sort of over-creshing cue. It's just a cue. What I'm trying to do, if the knees continue to extend and on a deadlift, my back angle is maintained and continues to be horizontal. The moment arm stays long in the back and that's what we call a clean pull. That's how you want to pull a clean. If the weight's not that heavy and I want to accelerate the barbell as I do on a clean because the weight's not that heavy and I can't accelerate it. If it's real heavy, like good luck. You can't accelerate the bar, it's too heavy. So if the weight is not that heavy and I want to accelerate the bar then I actually want to maintain the long moment arm on the back. Extend the knees almost fully before the hips start to open and I literally try to keep my shoulders in front of the bar as long as possible. Stay out in front, stay out in front, stay out in front, stay out in front and then whip, boom. And it's that trebuchet and it whips the bar up and the bar lands on your shoulders. That's a clean. But on a deadlift, because it's so heavy the second that my quads and my knees- my quads extend my knees and the weight breaks off the floor I am now in a fight to try to shorten the moment arm on the back, which means as soon as the quads, as soon as I've pushed the floor away and the bar's broken off the ground I immediately try to start making my back more vertical and the way I do that is I think about get my shoulders behind the bar as quick as possible and it makes it more vertical and the moment arm gets shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter as the angle changes. Like the length of your back is the same. The only two things that can contribute to moment arms are the segment length which is fixed based on the person and the angle of that segment. And so as the angle becomes more vertical I'm fighting that fight to get the moment arm shorter so that I can get that really heavy deadlift drug up my legs and locked out. I find that people who are good squatters like if you're saying to yourself and I don't mind squatting but I sure hate deadlifting. You're probably built in a way that makes squatting easier for you. You probably have a little longer torso than I do. I find Matt that those people want to get vertical too early and they want to get their shoulder back too early and if you like squatting do not listen to any of the things that Matt just said. Yeah, that's true. Because you're going to get your shoulder back too quick the bar is going to swing away from your shins and you're going to try to squat the deadlift up. And for those people and for those people I yell at them to keep their shoulder in front of the bar as long as they can. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. That's a great point. This is why coaching matters, right? This is why you can't just say this is sort of a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. What will tend to happen is people who are great at squatting will try to squat the bar up on a deadlift. Yep. They do not want to lean over. My brother-in-law, charity. You can't squat. You cannot squat a deadlift heavy. You can't. It won't work. Yeah. So, you know, these cues don't work. Not everybody uses the same cues but I'll tell you what everybody needs midfoot. Everybody needs knees out and everybody needs to push the floor away. These three that we've recently talked about I think everybody needs to start with those. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. The push the floor away communicates so much about what a proper deadlift should be in so few words that it's almost as good as the midfoot cue. Yeah. But you don't shrug the bar. You don't row it. Your arms are cables. You push the floor away. Your knees and through the middle of your foot by the middle of those cues actually work together because you'll often see people try to push the floor away on the ball of their foot or they'll try to pull the bar on the heel. So the back on the heel they're often are trying to over pull and not push enough. So sometimes I'll say push through the middle of your foot. Push through the middle of your foot. Yeah, often we'll take a new lifter and put my hand on the shoulder and I'll say, okay, no, we've already done some deadlifts, you know. And so I'm going to say, okay, midfoot and push the floor away. And if they do that, they're going to get what they need. And then at the end of the deadlift, your knees and hips are going to lock at the same time and the shoulder will go behind the midline, try a millisecond later. And so those are the things that we're looking for and if we don't see those, then we start giving these other cues about keep your shoulder in front of the bar or get your shoulders back or whatever. So we're going to push the floor away, Matt. And then there's another cue that we use that I use in conjunction with this or just after it, if I need to, which is something like squeeze the bar off the floor, make the bar heavy in your hands, take the slack out of the bar because we don't want people to jerk the deadlift. We don't want them to jerk the bar. We want them to gradually load up and then the bar comes off the floor and they stand. So I think that's important as well. And I think that was pretty important. That one's agnostic too. It doesn't matter how you're built. That's right. Push the floor away with your midfoot and squeeze the bar off the ground. Yeah. So I'll usually actually use the make the weight heavy in your hands before I push the floor away, right? So they kind of are occurring at the same time. But if you think about it this way, go back to the leg press thought. So if you've ever been on a 45 degree leg press, what they call a hip sled, just not really what it is at all. But that's what they call it in high school. You would not, you would not have your feet off of the plate, right? Like you wouldn't tuck your feet up underneath your ass and then slam your feet into the plate as hard as you could to try to lock the thing out. You know, because your patellas would explode and your kneecaps would fly across the room, hit somebody in the head. And yet people often do this all the time on a deadlift. You know that there are two telltale things that show me that they're yanking the bar off the ground before they ever yank it off the ground. Like a lot of times you can just see them yank it off the ground. Yeah, but there's a foreshadowing that occurs when they get ready to yank it off the ground. One of two things occurs. One, they open their fingers and then close their fingers right before they pull. Yeah. Or two, their elbows are straight and they go bent and then straight. Yeah. The hands or the elbows will tell you if someone is about to yank the bar off the ground. If that hand opens up, it ain't heavy in the hands because it's not in the hands. And sometimes they drop their hip just a little bit. You can see, of course, they're trying to get a run at it. You're like, yeah, that's exactly right. And then they yank, right? So this is the way you think about through those that five-step setup that you explained a minute ago that stance is number one. Bend over and grab the bars, number two, loose. Chin to the bar, knees out, number three. Squeeze the chest up. And between squeeze the chest up and push the floor away. I make the weight heavy in my hands. While I'm pulling my chest up or while I'm squeezing my chest up, I'm going to feel that bar get heavy in my hands. I'm gonna feel as the weight is heavier and heavier and heavier on the bar, more slack will come out of that bar. We'll bend more and more and more and more and more. And just like when it feels like it's about to break off the ground, push the floor away right through the middle of your foot and it goes. Yeah, I differ with you on that. Okay. Squeeze the bar off the ground by pushing the floor away and pretty soon you're gonna be standing up. Okay, that's fine. It's a fine distinction. Yeah, so the reason, let me explain why. This is, okay, let's actually break this down and talk about it. I'm saying this out of my own experience, right? So this is the way I lift. It is, I'm a big guy. I'm long-legged. I'm relatively short torsoed. I'm very bent over on a deadlift, right? So every little bit of bar bend flex I can pull out puts me in a better and better and better position. My hips get a little closer to the barbell, a little closer to the gravity vector. The moment arm on the back gets a little shorter. And so what I'm trying to do is get myself in a more mechanically advantageous position before I push the floor away. Because once I push the floor away, nothing else changes. I'm in that position. So I don't know that we're actually arguing but I set my grip, set the knees, squeeze my chest up and I can feel the weight get heavy in my fingers. And I keep doing that. And I keep doing that. I keep doing that. And what will happen is my back will become a little more vertical, a little bit more vertical. And remember, I'm not that long torsoed, short femur, good squatter. I'm the opposite. I'm a bad squatter. So I'm trying to get my back a little more vertical. All that flex pulled out of the bar, all that weight heavy in my hands. Let's say I have 600 pounds on the bar. I want 550 pounds of heavy in the hands. I agree with that. Before I push the floor away. But how do you want to get it heavy in your hands? By pulling on it, by hip extension, or by pushing the floor? Yeah, that's a good question. I do it by squeezing my chest up. Now, everything is taught in my legs, right? So my legs aren't, maybe that's, maybe I'm just, we're not communicating this super, super well. I don't go from loose. Like I'm obviously pushing the floor away a little bit. Just not enough to make the weight break off the ground yet. I hope you're enjoying this episode in the technique series of the Barbell Logic podcast. You know, at Barbell Logic, we believe that barbell based strength training is literally for everyone and that the only thing holding most people back from all the incredible benefits that come from it is good technique, inconsistency, and we can help with that too. And whether you're just getting started or you've been lifting for a while, it's difficult to know if you're performing the lifts correctly or if there's anything you can do to make your lifting better. We have tons of free resources online from basic how-to videos that'll get you lifting safely and efficiently right away to podcasts, articles, and videos that will help you troubleshoot common errors. All you have to do is visit barbelllogic.com slash technique to see our best technique focused content in one place. And while you're at it, you can sign up for a consultation with a Barbell Logic coach. This is a free form check and a chance to ask an expert all your training related questions. There's no reason you should be struggling to get started or to make progress. Check out barbelllogic.com slash technique for more information and sign up for the barbell logic experience. Again, it's 100% free. There's nothing better for your training than knowing you're lifting safely, training efficiently, and on the right track. All right, let's get back to the show. People often think like everybody that comes over to the house and watches me deadlift. The amount of time it looks like I'm pulling on the bar before the weight breaks off the ground, freaks everybody out. Like, man, you pulled on that for four seconds before it broke off the ground or whatever, right? That's actually not the case. I'm feeling for how much flex can I get out of this bar before I actually decide to go. And if you do that right, everything is so tight that when you get efficient, I don't actually think about squeezing the bar off the floor. Now, I use that term all the time for novices to yank the bar. Yeah, yours is heavy enough that the bar flexes a considerable amount. It's heavy enough that the plates come off the ground one at a time. You're aware of the lift and how you behave inside the lift well enough to flip a switch and go like you just said. Yes, the novice can't. And when they say go, they're going to jerk. Absolutely. So we squeeze the bar off the ground because if we don't, bad stuff happens. If I don't squeeze it off the ground, they'll jerk it. They could, you know, there could be some injury stuff. The shoulder will take the shoulder jump. That's right. The shoulders jump out of the out of position. The shoulder blades pull apart. You see like a big like, you know, the shoulder blades completely protract. I guess the right word. The knee will extend in the hip and the shin pulls away from the bar. Right. And the bar almost always jumps out in front of the doesn't maintain contact with the legs. It's one of the first things out. It swings out in front and now it's two inches off the shin. The devil is very interesting because we don't have the weight on us when we start the thing on the squad. It's on your back. Clearly in the press, it's in your hands in front of your body and you're supporting the whole thing on the bench press. It's clearly over your shoulder. You know, and so the center of gravity when you initiate those is where it's going to be. Yeah. So so let me say it. Let me say it in another way. You just said it exactly right. But think about maybe some of you haven't thought about this. The deadlift is the only lift that starts at the bottom. It starts with the concentric phase and ends with the eccentric and all the other lifts start with the eccentric and end with the concentric. Right. That's why it's called a deadlift. It's starting from a deadstop in the bottom. By the way, how much more could you deadlift? If you pick them, if you had the ball on the pins on the safety pins well above the knees, you get a very high rack pull. And then you had somebody pull the pins than our deal. And then you wrote it down. Road R. O. D. R. O. A. D. W. R. O. A. D. Road it. I don't know whatever. So you let it come all the way down and tap on the ground and stand back up with it. Well, you could deadlift more weight that way. Yeah. Because there's a stretch reflex that occurs. You get that big, that rebound that occurs from the eccentric. It doesn't happen on a deadlift. That's why it's dead. That's why it's dead. That's why it's dead. That's why it's dead. That's right. So when you bend over and you grab the bar before you push and take the slack out, your center of gravity is based on your body weight, right? So Matt Reynolds weighs 347 and he humps over and grabs the bar and before he pushes his feet against the floor and starts to load his hands and take that weight in his hands, center of gravity is somewhere between his thighs. He's humped over, right? But as you start to take the weight in your hands and press the floor, the center of gravity moves down, down, down, down, down because the barbell is heavier. Center of mass. I'm sorry, center of mass. Yeah. The center of mass starts to move down, down, down, down because the barbell is heavier than us. So when we squeeze the bar off the floor, we allow ourselves to gradually move that center of mass. And so it's less shocking. And so that's important. And then Diamond Darren Deaton has taught me that we have our concentric, our muscles can have the concentric action and eccentric and then isometric like they can fix their length. Sure. And they can resist loads more efficiently in isometric contraction than they can in concentric. Yes. They're stronger isometrically than they are concentrically. Correct. So if I can set my back in the isometric and then squeeze off the ground, I can more strongly hold the position of my back than I can if I have to concentrically tighten up my spinal erectors and pull my chest up under load. So we want to get that all set in isometric contraction and then squeeze it off the ground. And there's because if you jerk it, that impulse, the impulse force will pull your back out of extension and that's Deaton of a 40 fit radio, by the way. Yeah, so that's a really good point. So this is that those there's two polar ends of the spectrum here too. So most people who are built to deadlift and not built to squad with a yank on the bar if they jerk on the bar too hard and too fast, their shoulders will lurch forward, their hips will go up, their knees will extend, the bar doesn't move and then bar jumps two inches off their chins. But if they're built the other way, what they tend to do is they go from being sort of rounded to try to get themselves into extension and they scoop and they go right from loose to tight to pull. Right and they'll scoop underneath the bar and the knees will actually often become go into more flexion. The knees will scoop under the bar as the back becomes more vertical and they'll try to squat the weight up with a vertical back. This is what my wife does, right? So you can see that if I yank on the bar, my knees go straight and my shoulders lurch forward and the bar jumps out in front. If my wife yanks on the bar, her knees actually go more bent, her back becomes more vertical and she tries to squat the thing up. Both are wrong. This folks that had the longer torso, they're good squatters. You know, their backs long and their back pulls out of normal. It's actually not extension, by the way. It's normal anatomical position, really. Yeah, really in the normal anatomical position. They get that posterior pelvic tilt. And their lumbar rounds a bunch. It's gross to look at. You're like, ah, oh, no. You know, it's a big problem. So if your lower back goes into flexion, your problem, but you could potentially be a jerk in the bar. So push the floor away and squeeze the weight up. Yeah, the hard thing to fix with a client is when they actually do it all right and they still lose some extension in their back. You know, like the Nikki Sims problem. So, you know, Nikki sets up perfectly on the squat. She gets her back in perfect extension, normal anatomical extension, not overextension. Perfectly flat and starts to pull. And as the weight breaks off the ground, she loses the extension. She doesn't have the ability and part of that's because, again, she's her torso so short that she's so bent over that she's so horizontal that she just can't seem to maintain that. She's certainly not the only one. They've got lots of clients that do that. That's, well, it's a better problem to have than a person who just will not set their back in extension, but it becomes a strength issue that she's like, man, I don't exactly know how do we fix this over time? Right? When we back it up a little bit and start working our way up and it tends to often be one of those issues where the person who lost, who was able to set their back in extension and then lose it in the middle of the lift or in the first third of that lift, it used to happen at 225 and now it happens at 375. But it often is sort of the bane of their deadlift for their entire career. Like if they actually get a max effort, no shit, max effort, deadlift at a meet, they still kind of end up, they're going around in their back. Yeah. Yeah. And that's okay. And that's actually, you know, that and requires something else other than cues. It's going to be rack pulls and, you know, to help them, help them get their back stronger so that they don't do that. There's another one of the big cue shows. I don't know. Do you have anything else to say about push the floor away in the deadlift? No, I think we made a good point there that as sort of the wrap up is that everyone, regardless of your anthropometry, should think about pushing the floor away on a deadlift. Yeah. That's where you start. That's where you start. If you don't do that, the way you'll screw up the lift will be different based on your anthropometry. People who are built to squat with long torsos and short legs versus people who have long legs and short torsos. The way it will go badly for you, the way it will go poorly, if you do it incorrectly will be different. But if you push it away, if you get tight, squeeze your chest up and push the floor away and squeeze the bar off the floor, regardless of how you're built, that's the right way to start a deadlift or to consider starting the deadlift. Knowing that there actually is no such thing as a push or a pull, we're just setting our body in the correct position to let the muscles contract the way they should. I like it. We'll do a couple more of these big cue shows. I think they're helpful to people. Help us now. Help us. Go to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Thanks so much for listening and we will talk to you guys in just a few days. Thanks.