Posted on 03/14/2014 6:57:29 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way. There are a few subtle complications — the bar should move up and down the legs in a vertical line over the middle of the foot, the bar should start from a position directly over the mid-foot, and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that’s really about all there is to it. The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.
Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage, and bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for. With the bar in your hands and your feet against the floor, your whole body is completely involved in the exercise, which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.
“Kinetic chain” is an exercise term that refers to the musculoskeletal components (the “links”) of an exercise between the load (the barbell) and the base of support (your feet against the floor). The kinetic chain in the deadlift is essentially the entire body, and everything between hands and floor is doing its anatomically-determined proportion of the work of moving the bar. This means that your legs, hips, back, lats, arms, and grip contribute the fraction of the lifting that their individual positions on the skeleton and their relationships to each other permit.
Here’s the best part about barbell training: if you use good technique, your anatomy sorts out each bodypart’s contribution so that you don’t have to.
These large exercises — essentially normal human movement patterns loaded with a barbell to make them progressively heavier — eliminate the need for dozens of smaller exercises, and the strength you obtain is directly applicable to your job of being an active human.
Deadlifts are important, and you should be doing them. Here’s 3 reasons why…
If you look it up on YouTube, you will see large hairy men yelling loudly as they pull enormous weights from the floor. The current record in the deadlift is in excess of 1,000 pounds, the women’s record is over 600, and both lifters walked safely and proudly away from the platform. So, calm yourself. Be not afraid. The same movement you see at the powerlifting contest can be safely used by anyone to develop a stronger back and legs. You just have to start with a lighter weight.
The barbell deadlift is safer than picking up a three-year-old kid, because the bar can be placed directly over the middle of the feet, the body’s center of balance. The ability to keep the barbell balanced directly over the mid-foot as you pull it from the floor up to the lockout position enables very heavy weights to be safely handled. And heavy weight is what makes people strong.
A barbell is 1.25 inches in diameter, is engraved with a knurled pattern, and the weight plates slide onto sleeves on the ends of its seven-foot length. It therefore fits nicely in the grip, and can be centered directly above the middle of your foot, the natural balance point against the floor. Kept in this position during the movement, the load exerts no net leverage on your balance while the bar travels up and down. The deadlift is therefore a mechanically efficient, safe way to lift a weight.
A correct deadlift is performed with the back in “extension” — the normal anatomical position of the spine, which looks “flat” from the side during a deadlift. It is held rigid in extension by the back muscles, the abdominals, and all the smaller muscles that lay between the ribcage and the pelvis that form what is essentially a cylinder of muscular support around the spine. These muscles get so much work during the deadlift that most people have no real reason to do situps or any other back exercises.
Your back, held rigid and tight by your back muscles and abs, transmits that force up to the arms, then down to the hands and the bar. The leg segments and the back segment are the levers that move the load, the muscles are the motors that move the levers, and the arms are the chains hooked to the bar.
The fact that the bar leaves the ground means that the muscles have generated more force than the gravity holding the bar down. The vertebral segments of the spine can wiggle, while the thigh and shin bones are rigid, so when you pull a heavy weight while keeping your back solid, rigid, and flat throughout the pull, your back muscles have done the job of making your wiggly spine a solid lever. This makes the deadlift the best exercise for the back muscles in existence.
Think with me here: Exercise strengthens muscles. If an exercise requires that you use certain muscles to perform the movement, and the movement is performed correctly, then the exercise strengthens all the muscles used in the movement as you lift progressively heavier weights. Doing it wrong doesn’t count, because poor technique means some part of the kinetic chain didn’t do its job — it failed to do the work, and therefore didn’t get strong. The use of less-than-perfect technique allows some of the muscles to weasel out of doing their job, then they fail to get strong, and then they cannot do their job.
This is an extremely important point, because the fashion now is the use of lots of different exercises for each of the little pieces of the kinetic chain of the movement. For example, you don’t stop deadlifting and start doing isolation lower-back work to fix the back muscles if they cannot hold the spine flat — you stop deadlifting incorrectly by taking off enough weight to permit the back muscles to do their job correctly, and then slowly get heavier.
Done with perfect technique, the deadlift is a perfect example of why the use of major multi-joint exercises is superior to a collection of smaller exercises.
In addition to allowing the use of heavy weights, this spreads the work over the whole system, thus keeping the majority of the stress off of any one single joint or muscle. As a multi-joint barbell exercise, the deadlift can gradually increase in weight over a very long period of time. Starting with a light weight you can do perfectly and going up slowly from there, it is possible to improve your deadlift strength for years. This is not possible with smaller muscle group exercises, which tend to stall in progress rather quickly and which therefore lack the deadlift’s potential to make you stronger.
It took quite a while for the 1000-pound guy to get that strong, but his process is the same as yours — a few pounds at a time. You may have no interest in pulling 1000 pounds, but a stronger deadlift makes for a stronger you.
I am a Bass Player.
My amp is about the size of a trash compactor.
I do this exercise every day! LOL!
Picking up heavy things decreases my MTBF, and voids my warranty. God made fork lifts for a reason.
/johnny
It’s also a great way to find the weak link between your hands and your feet.
Meaning, it is very easy to overwhelm any of the smaller connections in between.
You still need a total body workout to ensure you’re developing the more fragile connections.
Oh man, that hurts my back just thinking about it. To all you young lifters out there, seek out a genuine powerlifter and learn good form.
A couple of month's ago a very polite, fit looking guy asked me if I was done with the squat rack at my gym. When I finished I couldn't help but keep an eye on him because it looked like he was going to be squatting a lot of weight. Within minutes he had 405 lbs. on the bar and was doing squats almost all the way to the floor like it was a feather on his back.
A few weeks ago I was watching the Olympics and there he was, bronze medalist in the bobsled event from Melrose,Ma., Steve Langton.
I disagree with this completely. AFter squats, I see bad from on deadlifts more an any other exercise, even among relatively experienced weight trainers. And it's a dangerous exercise to do with bad form. Common errors are failure to maintain a straight back, slouchinig shoulders forward and overuse of butt and thighs to lift the weight at the end of the movement. These errors become magnified as the weight is increased. And too many lifters are using more weight than they can handle. (an ego thing.) Having said that, squats and deadlifts are probably the two best weight training exercies there are with pull ups coming in third. EAT-SLEEP-LIFT
It’s a great way to break the needed perfect form and really hurt yourself. Most people don’t do it right, and never will. Unless you are a competitive power lifter, there is no reason to do this exercise. The muscles involved can be trained more effectively and far more safely with alternative movements. If you are tall and lean, dead lift and squat are injuries just waiting to happen.
Bicycling your ass around *instead* of driving makes obesity impossible and accomplishes something for the time and effort.
Also do exercises to stretch your spine in both flexion and extension before and after. Not a bad idea to pay a professional trainer or physical therapist to show you how.
DON'T GET GREEDY.
I moving to a new house, hundreds of bends and lifts over a month, I lost ten pounds and feel great. No to mention hundreds of climbs up and down stairs.
Eat right and stay active and you can get into reasonable shape. Sit or lie around and over eat - gain weight.
It’s really that simple. I think the popularity of gyms isn’t about working out, they’re pick up joints for the youth.
Prefer curls (60% body weight max, 3 sets, 10 reps each), straight back an absolute must and push ups (50 to 100), lots safer on the back for geezers.
Throw in walking a mile or two a day and that will keep you in halfa$$ shape :)
Au contraire...After power walking for 20+ years I decided to join a gym..
My Pilates class means I no longer visit the chiropracter...The intervals I do on the treadmill means I have lost 9% in body fat (@6% more to go)..
I could not have done this on my own...altho I admit it is possible now to do many exercises at home...but less motivating
What about shoveling snow? Does that count? :)
Like a Freeper friend told me, shovel the driveway to go to work, shovel it again when you make it home, sounds like enough exercise to me.
Only if you use poor form. Done right they are the best exercise, bar none, for strenghening the back. With regard to curls, you are spending a lot of time working a single muscle the size of an orange. (biceps). Close grip chin ups will work your biceps every bit as much as curls as well as working your lats, shoulders, serratus and traps. I do only one or two sets of curls a week and think I'm probably overdoing it at that. Curls are probably the most overused exercise in the gym but everyone thinks that's the key to having big guns like Arnold.
"If you want to lift weights," he would say, "you can come to my barn and stack hay bales for free! Hell, if it was haying season and I had a load to put in the loft, I might even pay to have them stacked!"
"If you want to lift weights," he would say, "you can come to my barn and stack hay bales for free! Hell, if it was haying season and I had a load to put in the loft, I might even pay to have them stacked!"
The greatest piece of body building equipment ever invented can be had at any hardware store for about $40. They call it a “post-hole digger”.
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