 Hi, I'm Lance Coyke and this is the deadlift. So the deadlift is one of my favorite exercises. I give some variation of this to every client that I work with, honestly. It's great for training the posterior chain of muscles, so to speak. That's the upper back, the lower back, the lats, the glutes, the hamstrings, even the calves to some extent. So what I wanna walk through today is how to do it correctly and then some common pitfalls that you might run into. So first, I want you to line up with your shins just barely away from the bar. And I like to teach it in two steps. So first, it's a Romanian deadlift. That's kind of like a stiff leg deadlift. If you don't know what that is, I'll link to it below. So shins stay about vertical and from here, what I'm gonna do is just squat down until my hands get to the bar, okay? I'm not gonna reach down like this. I'm just gonna squat down, okay? So it looks like this. Bend, squat, and now I just have to reverse it. So I'm going to push through the ground and then I'm gonna bring my hips forward and I stand up. And then I use the lowering as a portion or as an opportunity to practice this movement, okay? One more. My hips back, squat, I push, and I come up. So what do people do when they do this wrong? First, when lining up, if you line up too far away from the bar and you never roll it back where it's supposed to be, your knees get in the way and you turn this deadlift into a squat. A deadlift is not a squat and I don't want you to pick the weight up the same way. Different variations of deadlifts are more like squats. So let's say if I'm standing on a block and I'm doing deadlifts from a deficit, we say, that's gonna require more knee flexion. It's gonna require more mobility to get down there. It's gonna look more like a squat. Trap bar deadlift or a hex bar deadlift, that's similar. With the straight bar, though, I want a little bit more bending and a little bit less squatting. So if I line up too far away, I have to bring my knees forward so that I don't fall over or I don't just pitch over like this, okay? I'm trying to maximize my leverage. If I do this and I pick it up, then my knees never get out of the way or I fall forward and my heels come up or I do this and then just let's it up with my back. Okay, so those are not ideal. All we're trying to do is maximize leverage. I want you to be the most efficient lifter you can and you'll put more weight on the bar. So lining up too far away, what else can we do? So even if I line up correctly, it's still easy to turn this into just kind of an RDL here, just a really deep RDL. And now you see I don't have knee bend. I'm not going to drive through my legs to get the bar off the ground. I'm not going to recruit my quads to get the bar off the ground. Instead, this is more of a hip back kind of lift and it requires a lot of mobility. If you're going to do it safely, most people don't have that mobility. The two main lifting faults that people run into is either their butt comes up too quick or their shoulders come up too quick. So if I'm lined up and I'm ready to pull this bar and my butt comes up real quick, now you see how my back angle with the ground changes. What I'm looking for is in a good lift, that back angle, as I push through the floor to get the bar to my knee, that back angle stays relatively the same, okay? If my butt comes up too quick, that back angle tilts down and if my shoulders come up too quick, that back angle rears up. If my shoulders come up too quick, I pull the bar into my knee. What I want, that's not maximizing leverage, right? And that's the main goal of how we're trying to get good form with a deadlift. I want to maximize leverage. So I don't want it to turn into a back lift and I don't want it to get blocked by my knee. So those are the main faults you're going to run into. We talked about pitching over too far. We talked about rearing your shoulders up too quickly. We talked about lining up too far away from the bar. Now, the deadlift has a bunch of different variations and maybe someday I'll go into all of them, but we talked about the Romanian deadlift. That's like half of the deadlift, okay? That's a really good way to start learning this pattern. If you can't do a good Romanian deadlift, I probably won't have you deadlift yet. What else could we do? A deficit deadlift where my feet are elevated and I have to go down a lot further. I'm only gonna give that to people who have demonstrated that they have the mobility required to do that difficult technique. You could load extra weight on the bar with chains so that it gets heavier at the top and lighter at the bottom. You could do the same thing with bands, either pulling the bar up or pulling the bar back down to the ground. Tons of different variations. Let me know in the comments below what your favorite one is and if you have any questions, holler.