 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Quakey and today I want to go through a really common mistake in deadlifting and squatting specifically and it's just, it's something that I see not necessarily in everyone but it's really common in people who really like to lift weights. I remember I saw a guy at a weightlifting course we were working on this with and he had this reversed spinal curve. So normally your upper back should be a little bit rounded, you know, you don't want to live like this but a little bit is actually normal. If I'm super flat, super proud, super military posture you might call it, that's generally worse for you than a slight amount, it's always worse for you, than a slight amount of slouch and sometimes it's arguably worse for you than a lot of slouch. Okay, so what we're going to talk about is what this mistake is and I want to talk through how we want to fix it. It's specifically in our big lifts like our squats and our deadlifts. So the problem here is I've reversed the normal curve of the spine so I talked about the normal rounding of the upper back but we also have a normal arch in the lower back and in the neck and what happens is we flatten out that upper back, that thoracic spine because we're trying to stick the chest out, keep the chest really proud but since everything is connected, if I just kept that I would fall forward because it would push my weight forward. So what happens is the low back has to push backward and the neck has to flatten out as well, the neck pushes backward and so I get this like super, super straight spine. Now that can be okay, it stacks the spinal joints pretty well so if I'm doing something super heavy it's advantageous, we'll say, it's advantageous to support all the load but the reason it becomes a problem is because when I do that I steal my mobility from my other joints. So if I flatten my spine, my spine doesn't rotate a whole lot and I need my spine to rotate a lot to move my hips and move my shoulders and not overload my elbows and my wrists and whatever your problem may be. Okay so the other thing to look at when doing squats and deadlifts with this super high chest up kind of activity is to get, since I lose my mobility, to get all the way down there. So this scenario I'm going to paint for you is you've looked at the internet, you're really like to work out, you maybe do CrossFit or something like that and you've heard on the internet chest up, you want to keep your chest up. And what you've heard is you have to squat below parallel otherwise you're not really squatting. So maybe you're me 10 years ago and you're super macho and you're like okay well I need to squat deep and I need to stick my chest out a lot and now my back hurts or now my something else hurts. So this is super, super common. With a super proud chest comes extra mobility at the low back. So with my squats I stick my chest out and my whole body is arched until about here. This is not low enough, this is not where I'm stopping my squat so I keep going down and I get this extra motion from my low back and I can feel it right there, hopefully you can see it on the camera. My low back pushes that way, my upper back is still pushing this way. So that's the issue. Now to fix it I've just got to take the reversal of the spinal curve out of it or I've at least got to chill it out a little bit. So at that point what I just showed you that's not just a flat spine that's a reversed spine so everything is going the wrong way. So the fix then is a little bit of slouch just you know don't be so proud with your chest when you're setting up for your squat or even when you're setting up for your deadlift right that's going to reduce your mobility it's going to you're going to run out a hip motion and you're going to overload the back. It's really easy to see this if you look at someone's posture if they do this and you notice it during your lifts you'll probably notice hypertrophy or muscle gain in those low back erector spinae muscles. When they move you you send this hypertrophy stimulus so it's a it's a good like I can look at you and I can know how you lift just by looking at you and not watching you lift it's kind of cool. So the fix is slight slouch and then from there I'm not going to let myself slouch more I'm not going to let my back arch because that's going to be your tendency I'm not going to let my back arch as I come down I'm just going to hold this position okay so something like this right now it's easier said than done right if I put a bunch of weight on the bar it's going to be hard again I'm going to go hind the brain I'm not going to think about what I'm doing and I'm just going to do it the way that I'm used to doing it okay so you have to you have to gradually progress yourself up into this it's just like any other skill you have to learn it okay so do it stepwise try it with a ridiculously light weight and make sure you're really good at it make sure you can get 10 reps in a row without pausing and then put 10 pounds on each side of the bar and try it again or 25 if it's like a deadlift you know start with 135 go to 185 it's going to take a lot of practice and you're going to have this tendency to go back into it so you got to you got to play against that a little bit but this is it's not that it's a low hanging fruit but it's going it's it's going to be difficult to fix this pattern but it's going to give you a whole lot right if I if I can keep my spine in the right position that is tremendous for making more gains and and plus you're you're not just going to stop overloading your low back but you're going to start loading the muscles that should be loaded like your glutes and your hamstrings and your quads and stuff it just real quick recap don't stick your chest out too much get just a slight little slouch right it's not like I'm crunching down just a slight little slouch another way to think about it is just kill some of the tension you don't need to be so vigilant before the exercise is even happening you want to only use what tension is required to get the thing done right I don't want to be super super tight even for my warm-up sets because it's unnecessary I don't need to restrict my motion that much if it's just 135 okay so slight slouch don't move the spine from there okay you got to stick the butt out you got to keep driving through the heels uh you got to you know you got to let yourself bend over if it's a deadlift and you got to load the hamstrings but you got to maintain that on the way up as well so use all your other cues that I know you've practiced and just try it out see what it feels like to to not have your spinal curve reversed