Deadlift.
The barbell deadlift is a full-body pull that trains the posterior chain harder than almost anything else in the gym. From the floor, the bar travels to a standing lockout by driving the legs into the ground while the hips, back, and traps work to keep the spine rigid and the bar close.
Step by step.
Stand with your feet about hip width and the bar over your mid foot, roughly an inch from your shins. The bar should not touch your legs yet.
Hinge at the hips and bend down to grip the bar just outside your knees at shoulder width. Use a double overhand grip, or a mixed grip for heavier pulls.
Drop your hips until your shins come forward and touch the bar, with your shoulders stacked just over or slightly ahead of it. Lift your chest and pull the slack out of the bar so it sits tight against your weight.
Brace your midsection and squeeze the lats to lock the bar close, as if you were tucking your shoulder blades into your back pockets.
Push the floor away with your legs and keep the bar gliding straight up your shins, letting the hips and shoulders rise at the same rate until the bar clears your knees.
Once the bar passes the knees, drive the hips through to stand tall with knees and hips locked and shoulders set back. Do not lean back or arch the lower back at the top.
Return the bar by pushing the hips back first, then bending the knees once it clears them, keeping it close and the back braced the whole way down.
Setup is everything, and most people rush it. Stand with the bar over your mid-foot. Not touching your shins, not a foot away, right over the mid-foot, about an inch from your shins. Hip-width stance. Hinge down, take your grip at shoulder width, then shift your hips down until the shins come forward and make contact with the bar. That contact is your depth cue. Shoulders stay directly over the bar. This position isn't arbitrary: it puts you in the strongest mechanical arrangement before you pull an ounce off the floor.
The "push the floor away" cue transforms the lift for most beginners. New lifters think of a deadlift as a pull. They yank the bar up and immediately lose their back position. Experienced lifters think of it as a leg press off the floor until the bar clears the knee, then a hip lockout. Lats braced against the ribcage (think: "protect your armpits"), chest up, and drive. The hips and shoulders should rise at the same rate in the initial pull. If the hips shoot up first and the bar drags up your shins with a rounded back, you're turning it into a stiff-leg deadlift under load.
At lockout, stand tall with hips and knees extended, shoulders pulled back. Don't hyperextend the lower back. That's not a stronger position, it's just joint stress at the lumbar spine under load. Squeeze the glutes at the top and return the bar under control.
One thing that matters more than most lifters admit: grip. Mixed grip (one hand over, one under) and hook grip are both tools for heavy pulls, but if you're pulling with a double overhand grip and the bar is peeling out of your hands below 80% of your max, grip strength is limiting your training. Straps for volume work, bare hands for competition-style sets. Don't use straps as a permanent substitute for building grip. And because heavy pulls recover slowly, drive the numbers up through patient progressive overload across the block instead of testing a max every week.
Common questions.
Conventional deadlift (feet hip-width, hands outside the knees) works the posterior chain with a longer range of motion and tends to suit lifters with proportionally longer torsos. Sumo (wide stance, hands inside the knees) shortens the range of motion and shifts more demand to the hips and quads, which often suits lifters with longer femurs. Neither is universally better. Beginners should learn conventional first. It requires less hip mobility and the mechanics are more intuitive. If conventional pulls always feel awkward or cause lower back strain despite clean technique, try sumo. The best stance is the one that lets you maintain position under load.
A slight natural rounding of the upper back (thoracic spine) under load is normal and not dangerous for most lifters. Rounding of the lower back (lumbar spine) is a different matter. Lumbar flexion under heavy load, especially as the bar breaks the floor, concentrates shear force on the lumbar discs and is the mechanism behind most deadlift-related back injuries. The goal is a neutral-to-slightly-arched lumbar spine throughout the pull. If you can't maintain that from the floor to lockout, the weight is too heavy for your current technique or mobility.
The bar drifts forward when the lats aren't engaged before the pull. The lats connect the upper arm to the lower back and, when braced, act as a natural cable keeping the bar tight to the body. Cue: before you initiate the pull, imagine bending the bar around your legs or putting your shoulder blades in your back pockets. Both images activate the lats. A bar that travels forward also creates a longer moment arm and puts more stress on the lower back. Keeping it close throughout isn't just efficient. It's protective.
Once per week is the most common frequency for most intermediate lifters and it works well. The deadlift creates more systemic fatigue than most exercises. The spinal erectors take substantial loading and tend to recover slowly. Beginners on linear progression (programs like Starting Strength or StrongLifts) often deadlift 3x per week at submaximal loads and recover fine because the weights aren't yet heavy enough to cause meaningful accumulated fatigue. Advanced lifters sometimes pull heavy only once every 10-14 days and use Romanian deadlifts or rack pulls as supplemental work. Recovery capacity matters more than a fixed rule.
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