The Deadlift aka Picking Something Up (Part 1)

1The concept of functional training gets thrown around a lot these days and I think the most fundamental meaning of the term is often lost. Functional training should describe movements and exercises designed to enhance every day function. I don’t know about you, but standing on a stability ball while doing dumbbell curls does not much mimic my every day activity. Contrarily, bending over to pick something up happens to be a very common movement in most people’s daily lives. The weight room equivalent: Deadlifts.

I find it interesting that many people think of deadlifting as bad for the back, and yet they will bend over to pick up a child, rounded back and all, and not think twice. I believe the misconception about deadlifting is that most people do not have the mobility to put themselves into a proper position to deadlift, meaning the only way to get down to the weight is by rounding their backs. This is why deadlifts and hip hinge movements are more important than ever. We do not need to start with 200lbs deadlifts; we need to start by teach our hips and butts how to work properly! We need to learn how to disassociate hip movement from back movement. We need to refocus on breathing and learn how to brace before lifting. When we sit all day, we lose our ability to move properly, and we need to slowly, but deliberately, work to regain our movement. So where do we start?

Step 1: Recognize deadlifting (hip hinging) as one of the most important movements you can learn. For a long time, general wisdom has said to lift with your legs (meaning a squat position), not your back. Well I am here to say that you need lift with your butt! Lifting from a squatted position is rarely optimal and if you are not mobile enough to lift with your butt, then I doubt you are able to squat low enough to lift with your legs anyway.

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Just look at the two pictures below. In the first, we have a relatively accurate depiction of what lifting with your legs looks like. Rounded back, heels off the ground, object out in front of you. This means that your back will be doubly stressed: first to help you lift the object, second to help you counterbalance the object. In the second picture, we see a deadlift: back straight, heels flat, with the object right in line with your center of gravity. This means that you can produce more power (driving through your heels, not your toes helps to engage your posterior chain: aka butt & back) while moving the object in a straight line. The line of the pull is important because it influences the force required to complete the lift. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, so when lifting a weight, the most efficient way to lift (requires the least effort) is to move the object in a straight line against gravity. If we look back at the “lift with your legs” picture, we see that the object will inevitably travel in an arch, increasing the amount of work required, mostly from the back.

Step 2: Start on the ground. Just because the deadlift is the proper way to pick up an object does not mean that your body can get into the right position to make it happen safely. So first things first, we need to make sure that your butt works and that you back is kept out of the movement. This is where I like to incorporate bridging variations. Two leg bridges, single leg bridges, stability ball hip extensions, and leg curl variations are all great exercises for working the glutes without getting the back involved. It is important to establish a base level of strength and activation before moving on to standing exercises.

As you start out, these should be your main hip focused exercises. Start with 2-3 sets of 10-15, and include at least one of these movements with every workout. Once you have mastered the floor variations, you can move them to your warm up and move on to the standing variations that we will talk about next time.

That is all I want to go over this week as I want you all to have some time to test out the movements, and start working to incorporate them into your workouts/daily activity. If you sit in a chair for a large part of the day, you NEED to start working on this. Most back pain results from the inability to properly recruit your butt muscles to do their job, resulting in overuse of the back muscles. One of the ways we can help to avoid back issues is to increase our hip movements. Another is to increase our stretching which I talked about in Pull Yourself to Better Posture. Start with the floor work, and we will be back next week to go over the best progressions for getting you to the deadlift.