The best deadlifting cues help you lift heavier while making the movement safer. Give these two a shot.
1. Protect Your Armpits
The next time you deadlift, think about someone tickling your armpits. Your goal is to try to stop them without using your hands.
That means you should tighten up in general and pull your lats back. This will create tension in the lats, stabilize your spine, and help straighten the back into position.
2. Keep Your Head Neutral
Whether you're squatting, deadlifting, pressing, or pulling, keep your head neutral so that the body stays in the right position. In other words, don't try to look up or down.
With deadlifts, arching your neck too much makes you struggle to keep a neutral spine. By positioning the head correctly, you'll automatically fire the right muscles and maintain a safe posture.
It happens every time I write an article or give a workshop. Someone asks me, "So, uh, Dan, do you think I should do it five times a week or should I do it twice a day?" It doesn't matter what "it" is – one arm lifts, Tabata front squats, Olympic lifts–I always get the same perplexing response.
Tudor Bompa is known to many as the man who single-handedly revolutionized Western training methods. After more than forty years of work in the arena of international sports, he's widely considered one of the world's leading specialists when it comes to periodization, planning, peaking, and strength and power training.
Over the past year or so, I've been swamped with requests from readers who want a program that focuses solely on maximal-strength development. What I'm referring to is a maximal-strength focused program that doesn't induce bodyweight from hypetrophy.
