Top 3 Tips to Improve Your Deadlift Technique

Having great deadlift technique is so important, but more often than not, the tips you get to improve your deadlift technique online are complicated and are not always easy to implement. In this post I am going to go through my top 3 tips to improve your deadlift technique today!

The Best Way to Improve Your Deadlift Technique

Before we begin, I want to start off by saying that the best way to improve your deadlift technique is to hire a coach or enlist the help of a friend that has been professionally coached. Although this movement is very powerful, it can very quickly lead to injury if not done properly.

So we want to make sure you have the basics of the deadlift covered before adding in these tips to your routine. Once you feel comfortable with the hip hinge movement, come back to this post and I’ll help you master the rest!

Deadlift Technique 1: Don’t Look Up

I see this ALL THE TIME at the gym. People set-up a big deadlift, their hip hinge looks awesome, but then at the last second, they look up at themselves in the mirror.

I get it – you want to see yourself lift all of that weight. It makes sense, but it is actually hindering the strength of the movement. In the video I attached above, I explain how when you look up, you lose your neutral spine. For the majority of us who have poor T-Spine mobility, the moment we look up, we also end up pushing out our chests.

The reason we really do not want any unnecessary arching of the back is because this will actually put the majority of the load (the weight) on the joints and muscles in you spine – instead of using your glutes (booty) and hamstrings (muscles on the back of the thighs) to lift the weight.

To help you understand this, think about doing a bicep curl. From your middle knuckle to your elbow should be perfectly straight so that when you go to do your bicep curl, you’re calling on your biceps to lift the weight in your hands. However, if you tried to do a bicep curl with you wrist bent, you would feel the weight of the dumbbell in the wrist more than you would your bicep. This has to do with the physics of levers, so if you want to learn more about this, you can check out this blog.

So please, do not look up when you are doing your deadlifts. If you are going to do 1 thing from this post to improve your deadlift technique, let it be this first tip.

Deadlift Technique 2: Have Your Mirror Beside You

This tip links up with the first one nicely because if your mirror isn’t in front of you, then the temptation to look up decreases drastically.

The benefit of having the mirror beside you is that you are able to see all of the important set-up techniques with one quick look before you lift any weight off of the ground. Here’s a quick list of checks you should do when looking the mirror beside you:

• Are your knees too far over the weight? If you have hinged properly, your shins should be almost perpendicular to the ground. If your shins are approaching a 45 degree angle with the ground, then you need to think about pushing hips further back.
• Are your butt-bones facing the wall behind you? Those boney bits that you feel when someone sits on your lap – everyone has them! When you are setting up for a romanian deadlift (different for sumo deadlift), your butt-bones/sit-bones should be pointed directly at the wall behind you. If they aren’t, you need to correct your form
• Is your spine neutral? Is your lower or upper back rounded? If someone were to put a flat piece of wood on your back, would there be very minimal space between your back at the board? Or would you have gaps between your lower back, mid-back and neck? If you think so, then it is time to correct that. I give a quick tip on how to set-up your back for maximum stability in the video above.
• Lastly, are your arms straight? You’re not going to be rowing the bar up. Think about a cable on a crane – if that cable didn’t have tension, the moment they try to lift the weight below, the cables would wobble and snap into place. You do not want your wrists, elbows or shoulders doing any wobbling or snapping in a deadlift.

Deadlift Technique 3: Stack don’t Pinch

The final tip to improve your deadlift technique was kind of mentioned in the previous tip, but I want to get into more detail about this, because I see this a lot with people at the gym.

People will set-up for their deadlift and before going down to reach for the bar, or right after they reach for the bar, they pinch their shoulder blades together like you see in the image below:

Although this is a very helpful cue when you’re doing something like a row or a face pull, you don’t want to be doing this when you’re setting up for your deadlift, because, as I mentioned before, this will likely cause an arch in your back that will lead to more of the weight being lifted by smaller muscles in your back instead of your glutes and hamstrings.

To correct this, I want you to use the following technique:

• set-up for your deadlift as you normally would. I go through it in a series of videos on one of my other TikTok accounts, which you can see here.
• When you reach down to the bar, I want you to take a firm grip on the bar. Your hands should be just outside your knees and gripping the bar with the thumbs under the bar and fingers wrapped around.
• Now, think about the bar as if it were a stick and you wanted to snap in half. Do that to the bar. You should feel your arms tense up all the way through your shoulders and down into your back.

By doing this, you create the necessary tension in your arms, shoulders, and back to protect your spine during the deadlift. It calls on all of the structures that should not be moving in during the deadlift so that all of the force that lifts the weight off the ground is coming from the powerful glutes and hamstrings, and not the smaller, less powerful muscles between your vertebra, shoulder joint and arms.

There you have it! These are the 3 ways you can improve your deadlift technique. Apply them all or try one at a time and see how your deadlift changes.

Let me know below if you have specific questions about the deadlift. I’d love to be able to help you get the most out of this exercise.