The Official Deadlift Checklist (AVOID MISTAKES!)

The deadlift is one of the simplest exercises that is also one of the most often misperformed. In this video, I’m going to show you how to deadlift and make sure you get it right every rep by using a simple 7 step checklist. You’ll learn how and where to place your hands, feet and body in relation

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. We’re talking deadlift today. One of the best exercises you can do if you do it right.

So we’re breaking out the checklist so we can break this down step by step and make sure that you do. Okay, any good deadlift starts with how you prepare your body to do it before you even do the exercise. So a couple things that I do: there’s two considerations here. Number one: you’ve got to have the feeling that you could actually get to this bar and do this exercise properly. So what I do is a quick, little routine to feel nice, and loose.

I put my feet up, against the insides of the plates, and I use them to stretch out my adductors in my groin because we know if you’re going to be driving your knees out – as you should be, as you’ll see when you press this bar off the ground, and pull it off the ground – I say ‘press’. That’s the key difference, too. You’re going to want to make sure that you have adequate flexibility here through your adductors. The next thing I do is, I feel as if I want to keep my hamstrings engaged, and I also want to have my pelvis in the right position. So I lean forward where to grab the bar, and I try to get myself into an anterior pelvic tilt.

So I’m trying to rotate my pelvis all the way down until it’s facing the ground. All the way down. Point your junk down to the ground, keep your hands on the bar, and then keep your head up. Look straight ahead and just feel the stretch in your hamstrings, and feel the stretch here in all those attachments to your pelvis that we know we feel like we’re in that good position. Once I do that – just for a couple minutes until I feel nice, and loose – the next thing I’ll do is this pre-deadlift movement pattern.

That is, I stand here, I keep my hands on my thighs – you’re going to see why this is very important in a second – and I let them slide down until the level of the knees, by doing nothing but hip hinging. If you just did what I showed you that hip hinge should feel really easy now. So right down to here, no bending the knees. From here, once I get to the level of the knees, then maintaining this low back, I just let my hands drop straight down by bending nothing but the knees. Then I work on going back up and feeling the first few inches of this to be nothing but let press as I get to the level of the knees, and then driving through with nothing but the hips.

So it’s hip hinge to the level of the knees, drop the knees down, push through the knees, hip hinge, and finish it all the way here, through extension. Just use that movement pattern until you feel as if you’ve got it down, and then you’re ready to start lifting the bar. Now we’re ready to actually approach the bar. There is something you want to focus on here. There are actually two things you want to focus on.

First of all, how far under the bar are your feet going to go? And how far apart should your feet be? First of all, let’s deal with the easy one. The width of your feet should be the width of your hips. Now, for someone that doesn’t have a really wide physique like me, that could be pretty narrow.

You see mine. I’m actually inside the non-knurled areas of the bar, here. For you, that could be a little bit wider, but it doesn’t matter. You just want to be hip width. As far as ‘how far under the bar the feet should actually go’, there’s a little cue I like to use here.

I want to just see my laces on the other side of the bar. So you can see right now I can’t. My laces are actually being covered by the bar. If I sneak them out, just to the other side here, now I’ve actually setup the right position for this bar. Which should be about 1” away from my shin because when I go down to the bar my shins will go forward to meet that bar, and that is the proper position.

Now, a lot of people will try to roll the bar away, and then roll it back. That’s sort of a pre-lift ritual, but ultimately what they’re doing is they’re getting that bar back to that position, and they’re using the experience that they have, and being comfortable with moving the bar to get it there, ultimately, in the right position. If you’re new and you’re just learning this exercise; take one of those variables out. Get set to the bar and don’t change anything else. Get yourself about 1” away, get ready to perform the lift, and just go ahead and do it.

Okay now, with the feet in the proper place, now we’ve got to get the hands in the proper placement. There are two elements I want to cover here. It is the type of grip that we’re going to use – because we’ve probably seen a lot of different grips being used on this exercise – as well as the width of your hands on the bar when you perform the lift. So first of all, let’s talk about the type. You have three different options here when it comes to how you’re gripping the bar.

Most commonly, you probably see this ‘double overhand grip’. There’s a great advantage to this that we’re going to get into when we actually talk about performing the lift, but at the surface level here, this is giving you the most balanced distribution of your upper body, and how you’re gripping the bar so you don’t create muscle imbalances by gripping the bar. The second option that you’ll see is often the choice when you feel as if this is too weak of a grip, because the bar starts to roll out of your hands. So what do we do? We see people do a mixed grip.

The mixed grip is one under, one over. The one under and one over allows the bar to stop rotating, because as it starts to fall out of this hand, it’s actually turning more into this hand. So you’re creating more stability. It’s the same way you would grab a baseball bat. Your dominant hand would be on the top here, and the underhand, you just take that baseball bat, and turn it.

That’s what you’re doing here, on the bar. However, in order to eliminate some of the muscular imbalances that could be created from doing this – especially up in your shoulder girdle – you would want to alternate the grips here. So you have a third option. This is the option chosen by more of the advanced lifters that perform this lift. That would be a hook grip where you take your thumb, you wrap it around, and then you wrap your fingers over your thumb.

So if you look at it here, they wrap their fingers around that thumb. Now I’m going to tell you, if you’re going to do this, number one: it’s going to be very uncomfortable. It’s going to feel like you’re snapping your thumb off. But in order to alleviate that you want to grip on that first digit here. That first knuckle right here.

If you go on top here you’re really going to feel like you’re snapping your thumb off. Okay, from here I still would advise – if you’re going to do this, you’re going to want to build up to this by starting with lighter weights, accommodating to this discomfort that you might feel on this the first time you do it, and then over time, of course, your body is going to become resilient to it. It will be, overall, your most effective grip, your strongest grip, and it will also not lead to those imbalances that the mixed grip would. Now as far as the width, and how wide I want my hands on the bar, that actually brings up a point from the last topic. That is, a lot of people think that the mixed grip is what is responsible for leading to bicep tears during the deadlift.

A lot of people are scared about tearing a bicep during a deadlift. More so, it actually comes from what you’re doing with your arms, in terms of width, and I’ll show you why. First of all, people sometimes want to grab the bar wide. But what you’re doing when you gra