Start With The Hip Hinge
Now, you’re probably eager to practice in the gym, but hang on a moment. I often work with lifters who want to rocket headfirst into a movement, when in reality it’s important to pump the breaks and master the basics first.
The standard deadlift is a heavily loaded version of the hip hinge, which is a basic human movement pattern.
The hip hinge is exactly what it sounds like: hinging at the hips. It’s not sitting down, but more like sitting back. This is one of the main things that makes it different from a squat.
The movement comes from your hips, not your knees. It’s like a horizontal thrust: your butt goes back as you sit back, then you fire your glutes forward as you stand up.
The barbell deadlift is one of the best exercises around, period. Whether you want to build muscle, burn fat, increase athleticism, or focus purely on gaining strength, it’s the one movement every lifter must do. But it only helps you out if you learn to do it right.
How To Deadlift
Look on YouTube and you’ll find a whole bunch of folks doing their best one-humped camel impersonations while dragging a barbell up their legs. Yeah, don’t do that. Every time you deadlift, you should be totally focused on good form.
Good form reduces injury risk. The risk is never zero, but good form distributes the lift’s stress evenly across tissues rather than placing a destructive load on a specific area—the lower back, for example.
Secondary to limiting injury risk, good form also boosts performance: The right muscles work at the right times to crane the bar from the floor to the lockout position. When you lift with good form, the bar follows a path that allows for efficient use of the legs, hips, and back.
Start With The Hip Hinge
Now, you’re probably eager to practice in the gym, but hang on a moment. I often work with lifters who want to rocket headfirst into a movement, when in reality it’s important to pump the breaks and master the basics first.
The standard deadlift is a heavily loaded version of the hip hinge, which is a basic human movement pattern.
The hip hinge is exactly what it sounds like: hinging at the hips. It’s not sitting down, but more like sitting back. This is one of the main things that makes it different from a squat.
The movement comes from your hips, not your knees. It’s like a horizontal thrust: your butt goes back as you sit back, then you fire your glutes forward as you stand up.
Butt To Wall With PVC Watch The Video – 00:26
When you do a good hip hinge, you keep a neutral spine while loading the hips and posterior chain, or the muscles along the backside. To try hinging, stand near a wall facing out, softly bend at the knees, keep an arch in your lower back, and sit back by hinging at the hips until your butt touches the wall. Voila! You’ve hinged.
Learning to hinge before stepping up to a barbell helps you lift safer and stronger, so learn to hinge well before you deadlift! For an even more detailed guide, check out my article, “How to Hip Hinge for Ultimate Performance.”
Proper Form For The Deadlift
Once you’ve mastered the hip hinge, you’re ready to work toward the main event. What does good deadlift form look like?
- Your feet should be spaced hip-width apart with your grip just outside your legs.
- Use an overhand grip.
- Your back should be flat—neutral spine—from start to finish.
- Your shoulders should be back and down.
- The bar should remain in contact with your legs for the entire range of motion.
- Your hips and knees should move together to transfer the bar from the ground to an upper-thigh, locked position.3
If you can’t keep a flat back when setting up to deadlift from the floor, don’t lift from the floor! There’s no rule that says you have to.
Elevate the bar on squat-rack pins or jerk boxes to a position in which you can flatten your spine. This great deadlift variation is called a “rack pull,” and it’s especially good for those with mobility issues that limit their range of motion.
Since many beginners have mobility issues, like tight hamstrings, I recommend you start with the rack pull and gradually progress to the full-range pull.
How To Progress Safely
How do you know if a weight’s too heavy? For a beginner, the answer is simple: it’s too heavy when your form breaks down. If your spine rounds or your hips and knees don’t move together, the weight is probably too heavy.
The safest way to progress in weight is to hire a qualified coach to write your program and cue your lifts. If that’s not in the cards, it’s best to simply add 5-10 pounds to the bar each week. It sounds slow and boring, but you’ll get a lot of practice while earning the ability to lift heavy.
Why Deadlift?
So, why bother to learn to deadlift? Quite simply, it’s one of the most effective exercises for developing the pure strength that leads to bodily size and athleticism. Since it’s a full-body movement that uses a lot of muscle mass, the deadlift also builds total-body muscle.1
It’s one of the few lifts that directly targets the hamstrings, a group of muscles often overlooked in the weight room.2 It also works your glutes, lats (upper back), and core.
This magic lift also improves posture. We live most of our lives focusing on the front of our bodies, ignoring our rears. In turn, we develop bodily frames without balance, leading to a host of postural issues—hunched shoulders and weak backs, for example.
Deadlifting reintroduces us to our body’s backside—the hamstrings, glutes, and back. Posterior training balances the body, helping us stand taller and with greater strength.
In short, deadlifting will build muscle, improve your posture, give you balanced, full-body strength, and turn you into a total gym badass. After all, there’s nothing quite like ripping heavy weight from the ground.
