3 Key Cues For Bigger Deadlifts

Being the owner of a big deadlift (2x bodyweight and beyond) comes with some awesome benefits for your health, strength, and fitness. But done incorrectly, they can have some pretty negative outcomes for your health, strength and fitness (nobody is getting fitter laying flat on the floor or when they're struggling to put their own socks on). Lucky for you, I've brought together 3 of my favourite and most effective coaching cues to help people both lift bigger weights AND stay healthy and leave any concerns about your lower back firmly in the past. This means you can both train harder, and more consistently without interruption, and both combined mean epic progress. So let's get into my 3 Key Cues for Bigger Deadlifts. 1. Line Up Your Knees And Elbows My first cue is all about your set-up, and getting yourself in the right start position. I want you to line up your knees and your elbows with your armpit directly over the bar. What this will do is ensure that your hips start at the correct height. If your hips are too high, your knees will appear behind you elbows. This means you will have to excessively use your lower back to lift the bar, likely rounding it in the process. If your hips are too low, your knees will appear in front of your knees, and create an obstacle for a vertical bar path. The bar will most likely have to travel forwards to pass the knees in this instance, shifting your weight forward to compensate and again loading the lower back. With the knees and elbows aligned, and the armpit on top of the bar, you should find yourself with the bar across the middle of your foot, the potential for a vertical bar path, and the opportunity to treat the initial movement as a push rather than a pull (push the world away). This will in turn help spread some of the load to the quads and well as the hamstrings and glutes, and move some load away from the lower back. 2. Push Your Knees Into Your Elbows An additional benefit of this set up is that with the knees and elbows aligned, you can now push your knees into your elbows. This externally rotates the hips, which is done by activation of the glutes (glute medius in particular). We totally want to use our glutes as much as possible when deadlifting for maximum strength and to protect our lower back. This has the same glute activation benefits as your hip circle work, except this time your benefitting from it DURING your workout, not just in preparation for it. So set yourself us as in cue 1, knees and elbows aligned with your armpit over the bar, then push your knees outwards into your elbows. Once you feel the glutes kick in, push the world away and maintain the external rotation of the hips right through the entire lift. You will feel strong, and your back will be safer. 3. Protect Your Armpits There's 3 ways you can think about protecting your armpit, all of them resulting in the same outcome...

• Protect your armpits from someone trying to tickle them.

• Imagine you've got a purse with £10,000 tucked under your arm and someone wants to steal it.

• Pretend that your armpits stink and you want to conceal the stank.

In all of these scenarios you shoulder end up squeezing your lats and depressing your shoulder-blades (putting them in your back pockets). This will in turn help you with two things:

• Pinning the bar to your legs using the lats to keep it close and in a mechanically advantageous position.

• Fixing your lats which in turn tighten almost the whole length of your back, stopping it from flexing under load (a bad thing).

Both of these things help you lift bigger weights, and keep your back in the best position to deal with heavier loads on the deadlift (a GREAT thing). CONGRATULATIONS: Your set-up is now set-up. The best thing about all of these three cues is that you can get them set BEFORE you start to lift the bar, making them easy to implement and check-off like a tick list of to-do's before lifting heavy weights. And if you start in a great position, you stand a really good chance of executing a really nice looking and feeling lift. If you start in the wrong position with a poor set-up, you never really stood a chance of getting it right. This is why your set up is so important. So take these three cues, and start checking them off before each and every deadlift rep you do from here on in. I promise you'll feel stronger and your back will be healthier in the long run, and who doesn't want those two things. Thanks, Ian.