How to Deadlift by Greg Nuckols

• Most people should deadlift.
• Do you want to add muscle to your posterior chain, gaining quality mass from your traps all the way down to your hamstrings? You’d be hard pressed to find a better exercise than the deadlift.
• Deadlifts should probably be at the core of your training program.
• There are few exercises that can build or test head-to-toe strength as well as the deadlift (I’d put squats on the same level, with push-press close behind).
• When our muscles contract, they exert a pulling force on one end of the muscle straight toward the other end.
• While force is linear, moment is rotational.
• Moments imposed by a load on your musculoskeletal system are called external moments, and moments produced by your muscles pulling against your bones are called internal moments.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• The two factors that determine whether your muscles can produce large enough internal extensor moments to life a load are the attachment points of the muscles and the force with which they can contract.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force. There are only two ways to do that: 1) increase your skill as a deadlifter so your current muscle mass can produce more force during the movement and 2) add more muscle!
• The deadlift is a full-body movement, so a multitude of muscles and bones are involved.
• As long as your spine doesn’t flex too much, it should be able to tolerate the loads placed on it in the deadlift without issue if you don’t have pre-existing back issues.
• Your spine should always remain rigid and extended to transfer force from your legs and hips into the bar.
• Intervertebral joints are those between two vertebrae. To briefly recap: Each intervertebral joint is cushioned by a spinal disc, and each allows for only a little bit of flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion, which add up to large ranges of motion in essentially all planes when addressing the spine as a whole.
• “Origin” refers to the attachment point of a muscle closest to the middle of the body (proximal attachment), and “insertion” refers to the attachment furthest from the middle of the body (distal attachment). When a muscle contracts, it pulls the origin and insertion toward each other.
• There are three basic planes: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.
• There are four basic challenges you need to overcome in the deadlift: a spinal flexor moment, a hip flexor moment, a knee flexor moment, and, obviously, you need to be able to hold onto the bar.
• Knee extension demands are pretty low; odds are very low that quad strength will limit how much someone can deadlift with a conventional stance.
• The farther your hips are behind the bar, the harder the lift is for your hip extensors.
• In general, hip extension demands are highest at the start of the lift, and progressively decrease throughout the pull.
• In the Sumo deadlift, especially with a very wide stance, your don’t just drive your feet straight down through the floor. You also drive your feet out against the floor.
• Pulling a lot of weight depends, of course, on being jacked enough and having enough muscle to produce the required force against the bar.
• As a general heuristic, the best place to start [your stance width] is simply by performing a vertical jump, and noting what stance you naturally gravitate toward.
• Generally, larger people who have a little more of a gut to fit between their thighs pull with a slightly wider stance than smaller conventional deadlifters.
• Once you find your strongest stance width, the next factor to address it toe angle.
• The biggest difference between the sumo and conventional deadlift is stance width, with all the other smaller differences arising from the difference in stance.
• Grip width is pretty straightforward: take the narrowest grip you can without forcing your knees to cave in, or without causing undue friction between your arms and thighs at the start of the lift.
• There are four main grips you can take on the bar: double overhand, mixed grip, hook grip, and double overhand with straps.
• Double overhand grip is generally a no-go. Of the four grips you can take on the bar, double overhand is the one that allows you to grip the least amount of weight.
• If you grip the bar deep into your palms, it’s going to pull itself down into your fingers anyways, tearing your hands up without actually letting you grip heavier weights. Instead, set the bar either just above or just below the calluses at the base of your fingers.
• Grip the shit out of the bar, but leave your upper arms relaxed. Don’t try to row the bar when you’re deadlifting it.
• Always grip the bar harder than you need to.
• The biggest difference between gripping the sumo and conventional deadlifts is that your knees won’t be in the way of your arms when pulling sumo. As such, you can take a narrower grip on the bar. Grip the bar with your hands directly below your shoulders.
• Before you really bear down and rip the bar off the floor, you need to make sure your body is tight enough that your form won’t disintegrate as soon as you start lifting the bar. This is often called “pulling the slack out of the bar”.
• You should create as much tension throughout your body as humanly possible before adding the extra force required to start pulling the rep. You should already be pulling so hard on the bar when it’s still on the floor that adding just a tiny bit of extra force will get the lift moving.
• If your center of pressure shifts too far forward or too far back, it may make lockout excessively difficult.
• As a general rule of thumb, the bar should start about an inch or two from your shins, or roughly over your shoelaces.
• As mentioned earlier, a general heuristic for finding your sumo stance is to start with a stance width where your shins are vertical when viewed from both the side and the front.
• The biggest key to picking a heavy bar up off the ground is...to pay as little attention to the bar as possible. Beyond gripping the bar and pulling the bar into your body to keep your lats engaged, your focus should not be on the bar itself.
• To complete the lift, you need to extend your knees and hips while keeping your spine stiff.
• Generally, thinking “chest up” will help keep the spine stiff through the pull. That requires you to, at the very least, attempt to extend your thoracic spine.
• To initiate the pull, think “drive the floor away”. For whatever reason, focusing on pushing the floor away instead of picking the bar up helps people keep their hips from rising too quickly at the start of the pull. This is the cue for just the first 3-4 inches of the pull; after that, it’s all about hip extension.
• Perform each rep as aggressively as possible, applying maximal force through the lift. Research has shown that lifting at maximal velocity causes roughly twice the strength gains of lifting at purposefully slower velocities.
• Many people have a tendency to hyperextend their hips and spines at lockout. This is unnecessary for competitive purposes, and it’s necessary to gain the training effect you’re aiming for with the lift. It makes the lift harder without any real payoff.
• Many people who have issues locking out heavy pulls can fix their problem simply by engaging the glutes properly.
• The deadlift lockout is basically just a loaded pelvic thrust.
• You should set the bar back down the same way you picked it up: under control and with your spine extended.
• Remember, there are four basic demands in the deadlift:
• Keep the spine extended (or re-extend the spine if you pull with some thoracic flexion).
• Extend the hips.
• Extend the knees.
• Hold onto the bar.
• Speaking in generalities, the smaller you are, the more likely it it that sumo will be your best stance, and the larger you are, the more likely it is that conventional will be your best stance.
• Chalk increases the friction between your hands and the bar, independently and by soaking up any moisture on your hands to make them a bit less slippery. This can let you grip considerably heavier loads more comfortably.
• Liquid chalk is normal lifting chalk dissolved in an alcohol-based medium that rapidly dries after application, leaving the chalk behind on your hands. This keeps chalk dust from spreading.
• If you can’t hold onto the bar when attempting max deadlifts, or if there’s a big gap between what you can pull with straps versus without straps, then your first order of business should obviously be to improve your grip strength.
• Just because fat bar grip work is hard, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s maximally effective for improving your deadlift-specific grip.
• The easiest and (in my opinion) most effective way to implement grip training for the deadlift is simply with timed deadlift holds.
• The deadlift generally responds best to a fairly high frequency of hinge-pattern work, but a relatively low frequency of actual deadlifting.
• People who are built better for the deadlift (long arms relative to their body height) and people who pull sumo can generally train the deadlift more frequently and with higher volumes.
• The better and more consistent your technique gets, the higher deadlift volumes you can generally handle.
• In short, be a bit more conservative with your deadlift training than you would be with your squat or bench training, and prioritize building back strength. The stronger and more resilient your back is, the easier each deadlift session will feel, and the more often you’ll be able to train the deadlift.
• Hip position at the start of the pull is determined and constrained, under normal circumstances, by basic geometry.
• In general, longer ranges of motion mean you’ll build more muscle and “general” strength.
• If you can pull more with a belt and feel more comfortable with a belt, wear one.
• Deadlift straps work by allowing you to grip heavier weights or grip a given weight for longer.
• Straps over two big advantages: They help protect your hands, and they make sure grip won’t limit how hard you can train your back and hips.
• If you’re a powerlifter, you should practice like you play for the majority of your training, and deadlift with a straight bar.
• If you’re not a powerlifter, it’s perfectly fine to deadlift with a trap bar. In fact, it may even be preferable.
• Trap bar deadlifts are probably slightly better than straight bar deadlifts for most non-powerlifters.