2 Quick Ways to Improve Your Deadlift

If you’ve trained at The Movement Lab, you know we love the deadlift. While we may disguise it by calling it “the hinge,” it’s one of the first things taught to any new client. And if you catch me on the right Friday, you’ll see one of my multiple t-shirts about it.

We believe the deadlift is a foundational movement for building strength, improving quality of life, and increasing your resilience. And for anyone that’s had back pain (including myself), there’s a sense of empowerment to no longer being scared of picking up something heavy.

So if you’d also like to improve your deadlift, and you’re picking up what I’m putting down – I had to make at least one Dad joke – here are two quick tips to help.

1. The deadlift begins before you touch the bar or bell.

Because of the nature of the deadlift, most people think a deadlift starts when you grip the bar or when the weights begin to leave the floor. Walk into any commercial gym, and you’ll see the average gym goer bend over, grip it, rip it, and hope their spine is still intact.

Can this work for you? It’s possible.

But is it going to work for you? Probably not.

Instead, a good deadlift begins before you start reaching for the bar. We often call this “wedging,” and it’s a method of using tension to guide yourself into the right position. When performed correctly, it’s a much more methodical and reliable way of finding the correct position. It’s something Brett Jones covers well in the following video:

By actively pulling ourselves into the set-up, we’re loading our abs, hamstrings, glutes, and quads before we even think about picking anything up. After all, the secret to the deadlift is what happens before the bar leaves the ground.

2. Treat it as a dead “push,” rather than a dead “lift.”

If there’s one deadlift secret I’d like to whisper to the world, it’d be this: you’re not trying to “pull” the bar up, you’re trying to push the floor away.

Yes, there’s a difference.

The difference between “pulling” and “pushing” has as much to do with the activity of muscles as it does with biomechanics. First, when you’re actively trying to push the floor away, it should force you to engage your legs and abs much more than your back.

But beyond that, the reason “pushing through the floor” works is because it often keeps someone in good biomechanics. If someone thinks about “pulling the bar” their hips will often rise too early, changing their leverage. This is often accompanied by a change in our center of gravity, making it much harder to keep our lumbar spine safely stacked.

If, however, we think about “pushing through the floor,” it tends to keep us in the right position until we begin to straighten out their knees. This keeps the stress out of our back and where it belongs – the hips.

That said, it’s hard to know the difference until you’ve experienced it. In fact, I don’t think I truly understood what pushing through the floor meant, until I had significant weight on the bar. I can also remember a few years ago, when a client said “You’ve always told me to push through the floor, but I had no idea what you meant until now!”

So maybe instead of working on my own deadlifts, I need to work on my communication skills. I’ll see myself out.

In strength,

Alex