Most Important Deadlift You’re NOT Doing (START NOW!)

Set all new PR’s in your deadlift by training like a beast here

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. So, you are Deadlifting, right? We know how important the Deadlift is to a complete strength and conditioning program, but are you doing the version of the Deadlift I’m going to show you now?

You better be if you want to make sure you have the most stability through your core, lateral core strength and stability because this is where I find most guys lose a whole lot of strength when it comes to the big lifts. And the solution to that is to start incorporating the Suitcase Deadlift to your training routines. Now, the Suitcase Deadlift, it is a Deadlift, but what varies here is how you approach the bar. I’m going to show you in just a second exactly how to approach it and set up the right way. But we want to know why we’re doing it.

Because I mentioned, lateral core strength is one of the biggest places where we, first of all, we don’t train it nearly enough. We do lots and lots of Planks, but we don’t do a lot of Side Planks. So, we work on anterior/posterior stability, but we don’t work on this side-to-side, left-to-right lateral stability. And any time you don’t have stability through your trunk or through your core, when you go to exert a lot of power on a bigger lift, you get energy leaks through your core, right? Any type of force that’s generated from below that travels up through the kinetic chain that isn’t contained, right, contained through a stable trunk, dissipates off to the side.

You lose that force. It doesn’t go to the place that we want it to, in the case of a Deadlift through your arms to exert it to the bar. So, if you have that situation going on and you don’t build enough lateral core strength to resist that, you’re going to lose a hell of a lot of strength you possibly could generate, and therefore reduce the amount of muscle gains that you can see from your heavier lifts. That’s a recipe for disaster. You don’t want to exert all your energy, spend all your time busting your ass doing heavy lifts not to get anything out of them.

So, with the Suitcase Deadlift, I’m going to show you how you could actually develop extremely strong core stability from the lateral direction, side-to-side to preserve as much strength as you possibly can so that it will carry over to all the big Lifts that you do. Ok, so right off the bat, instead of approaching the bar this way and walking up to it, we want to approach it in a Suitcase Deadlift to the side. Now, when we’re at the side, hopefully you have a knurled center of your bar, the roughened area of your bar because that will visually give you your target for where you want your hand to go to make sure that you’re in the center of the bar, and then can maintain the balance of the bar so it’s not tilting in one direction or another. If you don’t have the luxury of having that, then you might grab it and find that the bar really tilts forward, you just adjust your grip. Or backwards, just adjust your grip accordingly and reset and start over again.

We get up to the side of the bar now, and again, our target is right here in the center of the bar over the knurled handle. When we get here, we have two options for how we can move our legs. We can do it more of a Trap Bar Deadlift style which would incorporate a lot more knees to it, right, this way. Here. But again, as a Deadlift, I feel like this needs to be more of a Hip Hinging movement.

So we’re going to do it the way we normally do our regular Deadlifts, and we do that visually with a very easy cue for you to understand how much Hip Hinge you need. You basically put your hands up on your thighs, and you lean your butt back as far as you can without bending your knees. Ok, and once I get to the level of my knees, then I can allow my knees to break to get me down to the bar, ok. So, from the side it looks like this. Again, hands on your thighs.

Just hinge your hips backwards. No bending the knees. Once I’m at the level of my knees, then I can allow my knees to bend just enough to get myself in position to grab the bar. So, we can do that. We get ourselves straight.

Now the key here is, once we’re down and we go to lift, it obviously wants to pull me in this direction. The key to the Suitcase Deadlift is to not allow it to do that to you. We’re working on that lateral pillar strength as I mentioned in the open. So, we want to make sure that our shoulders stay level and facing straight ahead. And that when we get to the top, we’re still able to drive through squarely with our hips.

Not driving through at a tilted angle, but that our hips drive through together in sync. Ok. Those are the biggest keys that you want to make sure you have when you’re doing this exercise. So, again, I come down here. I slide my hips back until they’re at the level of the knees, then I allow the knees to break.

I’m straight here. I have my head up. I’ve got my back flat, everything straight. Core is tight. From here, I push straight through.

And then down. Down. You can see, again, it’s a challenge. I’ve got a lot of challenges going on at one time, but the biggest one is trying to make sure you maintain that lateral stability. And as I said, that lateral stability is so key in determining the overall amount of power that you can generate from your toes to your fingertips on any of the big lifts, like your Deadlift when you square up normally, when you do your Squats, Overhead Press, everything, you’ve got to make sure that you have stability to avoid any of those unnecessary energy leaks.

Guys, I hope you found this one helpful. If you want to start incorporating this into your training as i highly recommend you do, start doing it a couple times a week just as a corrective exercise. One, you’ll start developing a little bit more core strength from the sides because again, Planks are a great way to do it, but not if you rely only on Planks. You’re not working on your lateral core strength. You’re working mostly on your anterior/posterior.

I hope you found this helpful guys. Make sure you leave a comment and a thumb’s up below. In the meantime, if you want to start training like an athlete, not overlooking anything when it comes to your training, head to ATHLEANX. COM right now and get your ATHLEANX Training System. I tried to put it all together for you in a step-by-step plan, laid out day-by-day, so you don’t overlook anything that we know is really important to your overall goals.

See ya guys back here in a couple days.