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Now this exercise, a lot of people would assume it's very dangerous, which it can be if it's done wrong. But when it is dangerous is not necessarily the exercise itself, but it has to be done in a certain sequence, the muscles have to be activated in a certain sequence. And that is almost always done incorrectly, especially by people that are newer but I often see it with people that have been doing it for a long time, that are using the muscles in the wrong sequence too. And this isn't an exercise that is for advanced athletes or for powerlifters only, or for bodybuilders only. This exercise I've had clients that are in their very young teens or not even teens, 12 years old probably and I've had people in their seventies, even eighties, that I've had doing this exercise. And even some of the people, when they initially come, they say, "Oh, I can't do deadlifts, it most of it hurts my back and whatever." And I've always found that the issue wasn't with the exercise, the issue was with the performance of the exercise. And once we had changed it and brought it around to where they were activating the muscles in the right sequence, all of the sudden the back pain goes away because the back is not no longer your prime mover.
So let's get right into it to make sure that people are setting up the exercise right. We're going to do it in three different steps, if you're not doing these three steps in the right order I would not recommend you do deadlifts period, because then you are doing a dangerous movement and you're putting load on to muscles that shouldn't be loaded at specific times. So when we're looking at the deadlift, we want to start from the ground first, because obviously you're standing on the ground and that's your first contact of the ground or with your feet. That's what gets the bar actually moving off the ground.
A lot of people think, "Oh, my contact is my hands on the bar. So I need to lift." So what they're doing here is they're activating their lower back as the very first thing and as the prime mover. Your back is not a prime mover in the deadlift everyone thinks that it is, it absolutely is not. Your back acts as a stabilizer. What I mean by that is your back needs to get rigid and flat, doesn't need to be upright, it needs to be flat. So this is still a flat back, this is a flat back as well, but not possible to get into that position and lift properly. So the back's job is to maintain that long, stable surface. Beyond that it doesn't do any actual lifting itself, it's a secondary type movement. The main thing that works off of the ground is your quads. So when you set up to the deadlift in the proper position here, this very slight angle forward, that's the first thing that has to change, that has to become vertical and that's done by pushing with the quads. It's not here, you don't stand with it. My back angle actually stays very similar until I get to my knees where my shins become vertical. So that's the first movement that happens.
Without that being your first movement, you're not activating the muscles in the correct sequence, and you're going to put stress on your lower back or somewhere else that shouldn't have stress at that time and that's when you're going to hurt yourself.
So I'm going to give a real quick drill that I do with people to make sure that they're activating those quads right off of the ground. So this is a simple thing, I just take a simple band. I hook it around something like this and I put it directly behind my knees. And then I get people to assume what their start position would be very slight angle forward here. 45 degree angle here because you're not squatting your deadlifts, you're deadlifting. 45 angle here, about a 45 angle with your torso, depending on how you're built. Now, I get people to practice this instead of standing because nothing has happened here, the action it comes from the quads. So the first movement is push back, that's your first action. Go back down, push again. And it'll feel very foreign for people to do this initially, because they'd been doing this and lifting because they have it in their hands. They're not pushing it off the ground, they're trying to yank it with their back and their upper body and that's what puts all the stress on the lower back.
So once people have mastered that, that's step one. Step two is now people will get here and they think, okay, now it's time to lift. So now they'll start lifting here. Well, what happens if you see my hands and I'm not using a bar with weights on it, because it would block the camera...
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