 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyke and today I want to talk about a mistake that I see really commonly made in the single leg Romanian deadlift and an exercise that I like to use to fix it. The single leg Romanian deadlift or the single leg RDL or the slurdle as one of my old clients used to call it is a hinging exercise So it's it's like a deadlift. That's why deadlift is in the name There's not a lot of knee bend. We want to keep the knee nice and soft and we bend over We get a nice stretch in the hamstring and even in the hip capsule of the glute and then we stand up using those muscles on the posterior chain of the leg To train the hip hinging pattern So it's a it's a good builder not only for balance but also for hamstring and glute activation Now one of the mistakes that I see oftentimes is this poor hip position And this is just a result of the normal asymmetries in the body Everybody has some element of this, but if you're doing your single leg RDL And first if you feel like your balance is way off This is probably what's going on this or you have some sort of foot and ankle thing going on But we don't have time to talk about that today If i'm doing the right foot down And my hip sags out to the side and my hips maybe turn to the right to kind of face the right I'm really exaggerating this. It's usually not this bad The other thing that you can look for is if you don't really feel your glute But you feel a lot of pressure through your heel and maybe through your inner thigh Then this is an asymmetrical loading pattern We are loading the right hip too much So what we have to do is we have to learn to unload it Conversely it might look like this on the left side Instead of overloading the left side and feeling a lot of hamstring We under load it we turn the hips away from that side And then we don't feel a whole lot of symmetrical hamstring It might feel a lot of outer hamstring Or you might just feel calf or hip flexor or TFL If you don't feel like you're loading very well on your single leg RDL Or you feel like you're falling over all the time Then let's take a look at this So with the asymmetries in the body The pelvic bones on the right side tend to tilt inward Rotate backward and raise upward While the left side does the opposite Tilt forward tilt outward and then it lowers away from you So when I'm doing the single leg RDL This right side tends to be really scrunched up And the left side tends to be really long Okay and that could be with the right leg down or with the left leg down Right it's the same position no matter which side you're doing Now not everybody has this to an extent to where I would fix it But if you think you do then let's give it a shot So my favorite exercise for fixing this asymmetry Is the standing supported left hip hike And there's a couple different variations that we can do with this one Essentially I want something to help you with balance I like to use a chair And you know I'm going to do it here Normally I'll do it here But just a demo right now It's just exactly what the name says It's a hip hike okay It can help if you put your right foot on a block So your left hip gets to hike a little bit more You get to feel a stretch at the bottom And then a contraction of this left leg pulling up into the hip So that's all we're going to do This is this is exactly the motion Okay so to set up for this one You're going to find some sort of balance Chair works really well You can also use like a rack in the gym And all I'm going to do is I'm going to shift 80% of my weight to my right foot And then 100% as I lift the left foot straight up off the ground The cue that I had heard that I liked for this one was Imagine you're pulling your boot out of mud You don't want to press like a step You want to just hike everything up When I do that then I'm looking for two specific muscles I'm looking for the left inner thigh muscles to turn on And I'm looking for the right outer hip Some might call it the gluteus medius I'm looking for those to turn on here If you need to do this exercise You probably won't feel them right away If you do you are an athletic person And I would love to work with you You probably won't though And what tends to happen is this right inner thigh Is just unrelenting It won't let go at all So when you hike like this Your weight stays kind of pulled over Your pelvic bone stays kind of pulled over To the right side And the right inner thigh won't shut off Now to fix this Generally we just do a few reps You want to go through a few breath cycles And after you do it for a little bit That muscle will start You're going to hold this nice shifted position That muscle will start to realize This is not a very advantageous position for me to be on Maybe I should just shut off And that's kind of the goal with this one So if you don't feel it right away Do a couple rounds Sometimes people don't feel it till the third round But if you don't feel it by the third round Then it's probably you're either not doing it well Or it's just not in the cards Maybe today or maybe ever I'm starting to feel it though After explaining all that to you So how will people mess this up Let's go through that first So when I do the hip hike If I shift and I list my upper body a way to do it I'm not getting the scrunching that I need To reverse the hip motion And instead I'm just kind of keeping Not that great position The spinal bones are not stacked very well And they don't tolerate that position very well So the way you want to think about it You want to think about your torso as an accordion And it's just bending and manipulating You don't want to move it this way Because then it's going to tear Right, not your body, but the accordion Okay So when I do the hike I want to make sure that the left shoulder And left hip come closer together Like this Okay, see I've got this little C shape In this way, this way, there we go This little C shape in my torso like this Okay, if I start to get more of a zigzag That's wrong Second thing is if you don't really have your balance Then it can be really hard to shut this muscle off So don't be afraid to push into the thing That you're stabilizing yourself with This is not an exercise that I would really say You need to do without the balance support Like if you can do it without the balance support Just go back and do your single leg RDL You know Because you'll be able to load that one up a little bit more You'll get more strength while maintaining your mobility Now a third mistake that I see often Is people kind of just rushing through it If this set takes you 15 seconds to do Well, it could be just that it's really hard And that's fine Just kind of layer on more volume as you're able to But if you're doing it and you're done in 15 seconds It's probably not long enough We probably want to extend the time a little bit more And we're going to do that by breathing really really easily So when we're doing an exercise like this And any mobility exercise I would say You should practice your nasal breathing In through the nose Maybe out through the mouth But out through the nose if you can Just try to stay super relaxed Deep slow breaths and pause after your exhales That will re-equilibrate your CO2 and O2 balance And blood health is also good for mobility We're going to leave it at that So as I'm doing this It might look something like this I'm going to I like to exhale as I pull up Pause Breath in And what you can try to do Is when you exhale reach that right foot Longer through the ground And that might help you kick on this outer glute on the right side When I hang on to the inner thigh on the left side As long as you have it Try to keep those muscles while you breathe in I tend to shake when I get it So look for that It might look just like me I like to do five breaths Sets of five breaths And I would do at least three sets Because like I said before Sometimes it takes a little bit of volume For things to kind of relax Okay we talked about torso alignment We talked about using a chair to help you balance Using something to help you balance We talked about your breathing cadence And making sure you're going slow enough Now a fourth one It's hard to say that it's a mistake But it's usually the cue that I use So I have to talk about it In the description of this exercise I say Hike your hip up Generally people just don't hike it up enough So if you if you're not feeling it After you know three or four breaths In your first set just on your exhale Try to get a little bit more hike And even that last little millimeter Is a big deal Okay that can that can be the difference Between you feeling this and you not feeling this So if if you've tried all the other stuff And it's still not feeling quite right Just try to exaggerate it a little bit more All right so those are the main mistakes that I see In the standing supported left hip hike Just to recap it's a torso position It's a make sure you're using your balance It's a make sure you're breathing With a slow nasal breath And make sure you're hiking up enough One other clarification that you might need to make Is when you hike up Sometimes hiking up more Does the first error Where you're twisting your torso Or you're listing your torso So the fix there Is that you have to make sure that that left hip And left shoulder are squeezing together Visually it's kind of easy to see My foot is over here I'm trying to keep my nose kind of centered over my right big toe If it starts to move over Then my joints aren't stacked And I'm not in an optimal position For maximum mobility All right if this one has previously Up you know we've done your troubleshooting And it's still too difficult to do Then there are easier ways to do it So our full version is I'm hiking the foot and the left foot is floating But our next step down version Would be to support that foot Okay So ideally I'd put my foot on something Like a pretty thick book You know maybe not dictionary thick But a little bit less than that I'm gonna I got my chair right here So I'm just gonna use this Even though it brings my foot forward a little bit And then I'm gonna use that support To support me To unload me essentially Okay so it's like I'm taking some of the weight away From the exercise Now big thing here Is you don't have as clear a line Of a hip hike to tell you where to go So you need to think maybe less about Hiking pulling your foot out of mud And more about pulling your hip up Okay drop the right hip And pull the left one up When we do this I'm gonna show you Here just so you can kind of see my hips So I'm gonna do the same kind of setup I like to start with an exhale Push through the inside of that right foot And then I'm gonna support it Okay And I need to bend my knee a little bit Because my support is too high But in doing that I'm just keeping my left hip scrunched up And I'm trying to keep You can see it a little bit My left shoulder is down a bit And then we just do the same stuff We take a breath out Pause and then breathe in And all the while You're thinking as I exhale And as I inhale I want a whole pressure in that Right outer hip That left inner thigh And you might even feel Some left lower abdominal here And good Okay so that is a standing supported Supported Left hip hike Something like that So not only am I supporting myself for balance But I'm also supporting that foot Okay so that is probably the next step down That's probably where I would have you try next If you can't get any of that You could even just sit down And practice You could put your left foot on a block Do not do it like I'm showing you here Where my toes are down And my heel is up You want your left foot on a block I'll put it on the chair That'll be a little better here And then I'm just gonna work on that Hip position again So left hip kind of comes up a bit Left shoulder kind of sinks down a bit Now since you're sitting on a flat surface on the chair You can't do that a whole lot But this really unweights you So that you can start to practice What it's like to sink that left shoulder down And it's the same thing Just same breaths Get comfortable with pausing after your exhales And then we're looking just for this left side To be nice and scrunched Something like that So you would repeat that for three sets Three to five sets of five breaths as well The next step down would be to do the same kind of thing Except you're laying on your side So I would lay, I guess I can just show you I'm gonna lay on my side Right here I like to keep my knees bent up Like this And then from here All you're gonna do is you're gonna exhale And bring that left shoulder and left hip close together And you can even relax when you inhale And then do it again when you exhale Same kind of thing I would do three to five sets of five breaths of that one And that is just a more remedial version That would make you more successful If you've been having issues with it All right, that's gonna be it for me Hopefully you found this helpful Hopefully now you have somewhat of an understanding On hip position And how to fix any balance issues Or hip alignment issues During your single leg Romanian deadlifts And you know, perhaps we can use these for some other exercises as well If you learned something Hit the like button and subscribe to be notified When I release new videos If you need something else to watch Well I mentioned it earlier You should probably watch the fix your pigeon stretch Left hip capsule inhibition Because when I'm doing my left single leg RDL Generally the left posterior hip is tight And so loosening it up Before you do the single leg RDL Can help you with fixing queuing that hip loading position Helping you turn your hips towards that front leg So that you can use all of the glutes Instead of more of the hip flexors and low back Check that one out