Have you ever heard deadlifts are bad for your back, or avoided lifting heavy because of a fear of hurting yourself?

If you ask anyone who’s knowledgeable about building strength, function, and longevity - there’s little debate that some form of deadlift should be a regular part of anyone’s training program. 

Whether your goal is:

• Full body strength
• Developed legs, glutes, and back muscles
• Athletic development
• Better aging
• Or overall low back and knee health

The deadlift is a must have in your program. While this doesn’t mean you need to set records and lift tons of weight (although you could), your body will benefit from having this in your routine and not leaving it out of your routine. 

That being said, all those benefits mentioned above are only available if it’s done correctly. Walk into any commercial gym or watch videos of people online performing deadlifts, and you’ll see all sorts of technique that will make you cringe. 

If you’ve ever heard deadlifts are bad for your back, that’s not true. If you ever feel your back hurting from a deadlift - it’s from the way that you’re deadlifting. 

I regularly get to help clients go from fearing deadlifts due to not knowing what to do, or because it’s previously hurt their back, to lifting very respectable weights and putting on serious muscle in the process. If you’re looking to improve your deadlift, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been lifting for years, here are some simple cues that will improve your deadlift:

1: Breathe and Brace

If you don’t properly breathe and brace before initiating the lift, you’re failing to stabilize your spine (very important) and create enough pressure to lift more weight (also important).

With your hands on the bar, before dropping your hips down to get ready to lift, take a big 360 degree breath into your belly/sides/lower back and tightly brace your core - as if you were about to get punched. You want your stomach/sides/back to push out, your shoulders should NOT rise up as you do this.

2: Pull Your Hips Down/Wedge Yourself Under The Bar

After you’ve braced yourself, it’s time to pull your hips down to the bar or ‘wedge’ yourself under the bar. The deadlift is a unique lift compared to others as it does not begin with a lengthening of the muscles like many other movements. In a squat or bench press, you begin by lowering the weight, which lengthens your muscles and creates tension. The deadlift is almost an entirely ‘concentric’ exercise, which simply means your muscles are shortening. Because of this, it makes it harder to generate proper tension, but you will overcome this by pulling or wedging yourself under the bar.

Your hips will start up high, but you want to think about pulling your hips down as you feel/create tension through your hamstrings and glutes. You will simultaneously pull your hips down as your chest starts to point forward.

3: Break The Bar/Squeeze Your Armpits

The ability to connect yourself to the bar, by creating tension, will determine how stable your spine will be and how much force you can generate (if you can’t pick up on the theme, tension is important). Now that you’ve braced your core and tensioned your lower body, you need to tension your lat muscles. Your lats play an extremely important role in both protecting your back but also connecting your arms to your legs, which will make sure you’re hips don’t come up too fast as your upper back rounds.

Think about breaking the bar in half, and if you’re doing it right you should feel this take slack out of the bar and engage your lats. Another popular cue is to squeeze a wet washcloth or $100 bill between your armpits.

4: Push The Floor Away

While most people will classify the deadlift as a ‘pulling’ exercise, you’d benefit from thinking of it as a ‘pushing’ exercise, more similar to a leg press. By doing this, you’ll create more force and properly engage the needed muscles throughout the lift.

Instead of thinking about ‘pulling’ the bar up with your back, think about forcefully pushing your feet into the floor to lift the bar up.

These are just a few of the simple, but extremely effective, cues we use with our clients that get great results in improving their deadlifts. Experiment with different cues to discover which ones help improve how you feel during your deadlifts and which ones help your performance.