Australian Strength Coach

Check out my simple fix to stop the hips rising up first in the deadlift.

In this session, I was training with elite calisthenics athlete

Deadlifting isn’t part of his sport, but we thought it would be a cool lift to get good at.

Everything looked perfect on the lighter warm-up sets, but as soon as the weight got heavier, his hips started rising before the bar left the floor.

My first thought was that he wasn’t taking the slack out of the bar properly, which is a very common cause of this issue. But after a few sets, it became obvious that wasn’t the only problem.

The biggest issue was that his lats weren’t fully engaged.

One of my favourite ways to teach lat engagement is to pull the bar into your shins and keep pulling it backwards throughout the entire lift.

The lats help lock the torso in place, allowing the legs to drive into the floor without the hips changing position.

To make this easier, we put knee sleeves over his shins so that he could pull the bar into his shins without making his shins bleed or bruise.

The difference was immediate. His body locked into position, his hips stayed where they belonged, and the movement instantly became stronger.

If your hips shoot up early in the deadlift, try this cue to help you learn how to use your lats. Pull the bar into your shins from start to finish, but make sure you put the knee sleeves on first, and feel the difference.

Do squats and deadlifts thicken your core?

The objective answer is yes, but you’re most likely not strong enough for that to be a concern.

When you load a joint, the muscles surrounding that joint adapt to support the load. As the load gets heavier, the demand increases, and so does the adaptation.

Your spine is no different.

The muscles surrounding your spine, what most people call the core, are responsible for stabilising your torso during heavy squats and deadlifts. Over time, those muscles can absolutely grow thicker and stronger.

Just look at the best squatters and deadlifters in the world. Most of them have incredibly thick, powerful trunks because they’ve spent years exposing their bodies to extreme loads.

But here’s the reality for most people.

You’re probably nowhere near strong enough for this to be a concern.

Most lifters will never reach the level of loading required for their core development to negatively impact their physique. In fact, for most people, building a stronger core would be a benefit, not a problem.

So my advice is -

If you enjoy squats and deadlifts, do them. They’re damn good exercises.

And if you’re worried they’re going to suddenly make your waist thick and ruin your aesthetics, you’re probably worrying about a problem you don’t have.

Low bar squats aren’t ONLY for powerlifters.

There are squats designed to lift the most weight, squats designed to build bigger quads, and squats designed to build bigger glutes. The stance, torso angle, head position, and bar position should all support that objective.

In this example, the goal was glute development.

To maximise glute involvement, I want to maximise hip flexion. The glutes are responsible for hip extension, so creating a larger moment arm at the hip joint increases the demand placed on them.

One of the best ways to achieve this is with a slightly narrower stance and by pushing the hips further back. This naturally creates a greater forward torso lean.

The interesting part is that she was already doing a lot of that exceptionally well.

Head down. Chest down. Hips back. Close stance.

The only thing I changed was the bar position.

A lot of people think the low bar squat is only for powerlifters trying to lift the most weight. While it’s true that a low bar position is fantastic for moving heavy loads, it also complements a glute-dominant squat perfectly.

A low bar position allows the torso to lean forward more naturally and comfortably, while a high bar position tends to encourage a more upright posture which is where I would want to be if my goal was to develop quads.

So this wasn’t about fixing a bad squat.
It was about taking an already excellent squat and making it even more specific to the goal.

This is an extremely common issue when weightlifters learn the low bar squat for the first time.

He has great mobility and can sit arse to grass easily. And this is necessary for high bar, Olympic lifting style squats.

In weightlifting movements, (cleans and snatches) the goal is to be more upright which allows maximum knee bend where the hamstrings press into the calves. You sit as deep as mobility allows and rebound off that contact. This keeps the hips under the bar which reduces tension from the hips and places the load onto the knees, which is why weightlifters all have great quads.

In a low bar squat, you want more involvement from the hips, and we do that by pushing the hips back which slightly takes the load away from the knees and more towards the hips which are a stronger structure.

One of my go to cues when teaching low bar is combining “push the hips back” with a physical reference. I place my hand on the lower back and cue the lifter to drive my hand up. That instantly shifts the focus from quads to hips.

The next layer is where the rebound comes from. Instead of bouncing when the hamstrings hit the calves, I cue them to feel the stretch around the hips, mainly the adductors, and rebound off that stretch instead of hamstring on calf contact.

As soon as he drove my hand up and bounced off the end range tension of the hips, his squat got stronger immediately.

The goal isn’t to cut squat depth. It will be less vertical, which makes it look like we aren’t going as deep, but instead of maximally bending knees, we aim to maximise depth at the hip joint.

When I coach the squat, I don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. I like to optimise technique based on the goal.

There are squats designed to lift the most weight, squats designed to build bigger quads, and squats designed to build bigger glutes. The stance, torso angle, head position, and bar position should all support that objective.

In this example, the goal was glute development.

To maximise glute involvement, I want to maximise hip flexion. The glutes are responsible for hip extension, so creating a larger moment arm at the hip joint increases the demand placed on them.

One of the best ways to achieve this is with a slightly narrower stance and by pushing the hips further back. This naturally creates a greater forward torso lean.

The interesting part is that she was already doing a lot of that exceptionally well.

Head down. Chest down. Hips back. Close stance.

The only thing I changed was the bar position.

A lot of people think the low bar squat is only for powerlifters trying to lift the most weight. While it’s true that a low bar position is fantastic for moving heavy loads, it also complements a glute-dominant squat perfectly.

A low bar position allows the torso to lean forward more naturally and comfortably, while a high bar position tends to encourage a more upright posture which is where I would want to be if my goal was to develop quads.

So this wasn’t about fixing a bad squat.
It was about taking an already excellent squat and making it even more specific to the goal.

Stop rocking back too far when you deadlift.

A common technical flaw I see with deadlifts is people sitting too deep into their deadlift setup. Usually, they’re trying to make it feel more like a squat, but the problem is the leverage is completely wrong.

A sign to look for is shoulder position. If your shoulders are behind the bar, the bar cannot come off the ground efficiently from that position. There’s no leverage for the bar to travel straight up.

If you let go of the bar in your start position, would you fall over?

The answer should be no.

You should feel balanced, stable, and ready to push the world away. But if your shoulders are behind the bar, you’d fall backwards if you let go, you’re sitting too deep.

Another easy checkpoint is from the side view. The arms should be completely vertical. This tells us the hips are at the right height, the shoulders are in the correct position, and you’re set up to move the bar with the best possible leverage.

Deadlifts aren’t bad. Your approach to training them is.

A deadlift is simply bending over and picking something up off the ground. And that’s one of the most common movements we perform in everyday life.

When someone starts training with me, I teach four fundamental movement patterns -

Bend
Squat
Push
Pull

Out of those four, the bend pattern is, in my opinion, the most commonly used in day to day tasks. And the best way to train it is the conventional deadlift.

The problem is how many people think about the lift. Because of what they see in competitions and online, they assume the deadlift is one of those lifts you’re meant to max out on.

But even the best deadlifters in the world don’t train that way. They spend months and building technique, work capacity, muscle, and strength so that when they finally test their max, they can lift the heaviest weight possible and do it safely.

They start light, with higher volume and over the course of the long term plan they reduce the volume so they can increase the loads gradually, and then they finish with a max.

Most people start with a max, injure themselves, and then tell people a deadlift is dangerous.

Deadlifts aren’t bad. Your approach to training them is.

Another session with one of Australia’s most elite weightlifters

She’d just finished her weightlifting class server’s when we introduced something new into her training: the deadlift, done with powerlifting intent.

For a weightlifter, bracing and spinal positioning are built around the outcome of throwing the bar from the floor to overhead, then receive it in a full squat and stand it up. That requirement changes everything about how you set up and how you move.

But a deadlift in powerlifting has a different objective. You do not need to project the bar overhead. You do not need to receive it in a squat. You just need to pick it up as efficiently as possible.

What Isabel does is technically perfect for Olympic lifting. For a powerlifting deadlift, there are adjustments that make the lift more mechanically efficient when the only goal is to stand up with the bar.

We kept it conservative for her first session. This is just the starting point. Over the next few months, we will see what she can really deadlift.