I’ve seen a lot of trainers online that caution against squatting up a deadlift. The reasoning seems to be that a squat is a squatting movement, and a deadlift is a hip-hinging movement. I can understand the idea of making sure you train both movement patterns, at least in an overall-strength sense.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen a number of strong deadlifters talk about how most people need to work on their leg drive.
Is there anything implicitly “wrong” with just squatting down, grabbing the bar, and squatting back up?
Other than arguments that say “that’s not what a deadlift is supposed to be”, it seems to me that any approach that lets you move the most weight from the floor to lockout is the right way to deadlift.
If you actually squatted a deadlift from the ground, the bar would run into your knees. Because of the load placement, the deadlift will always be far more posterior chain-dominant than anything. People who don’t understand biomechanics will try to oversimplify it and say quads break the floor, but that’s not really the case in theory or practice.
[quote]LoRez wrote:
I’ve seen a lot of trainers online that caution against squatting up a deadlift. The reasoning seems to be that a squat is a squatting movement, and a deadlift is a hip-hinging movement. I can understand the idea of making sure you train both movement patterns, at least in an overall-strength sense.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen a number of strong deadlifters talk about how most people need to work on their leg drive.
Is there anything implicitly “wrong” with just squatting down, grabbing the bar, and squatting back up?[/quote]
Yes. Yes there is.
“squatting a deadlift up” and “working on leg drive out of the hole” are not even close to the same thing. They are fundamentally different in technique and unless you’re a short squat bastard that pulls sumo squatting a deadlift up is almost always wrong and leads to a decrease in poundage lifted.
[quote]HeavyTriple wrote:
If you actually squatted a deadlift from the ground, the bar would run into your knees. Because of the load placement, the deadlift will always be far more posterior chain-dominant than anything. People who don’t understand biomechanics will try to oversimplify it and say quads break the floor, but that’s not really the case in theory or practice.[/quote]
Bingo. Getting stronger quads can help but only if the hamstrings and glutes are already tensioned and doing work. Not the same as squatting the thing up.
It is important to consider simple mechanics. If I am deadlift conventional, my knees are clearly in the way - think about squatting, the bar is above the heels and when you squat down, your knees and shins are clearly forward of that. Soooo, unless you want to try and deadlift with the bar like 3 inches in front of you, you can’t really squat a conventional deadlift productively.
That being said, if you watch a great lifter like Mike Tuscherer, he leverages off the bar pretty hard and sits back quite hard so there is in fact some degree of ‘squatting’ the bar off the floor. It is somewhat of a valuable cue in order to stress activating the lats and maintaining some degree of an upright torso and staying BEHIND the bar.
Now if you are deadlifting sumo, you should be squatting the bar off the ground. The sumo deadlift has two phases - a drive through the legs with a static back angle, following by pushing the hips through. You pick up the bar with the torso near vertical, push all the way to knees locked without shifting the back angle, then you finish the lift quite easily by driving the hips into the bar.
If you watch any great sumo deadlifter, you will clearly see this pattern. Unfortunately, a lot of novice lifters always try to pull back from a more horizontal torso (often linked to poor hip mobility and the bar being much too far forward from the hips) which is unproductive.
Well, it’s good to know I’m wrong. Now I guess I need to understand how to fix what I know.
I’m basically new to deadlifting in the first place. As in, I’ve really only done maybe 3 deadlift sessions in the last two years or so. I spent a few months with the snatch-grip deadlift, essentially as a replacement for a trap-bar dead (since I don’t have a trap bar), done with the hips low, very squat-like. I also spent the last month focusing on deep olympic-style squats.
So, given that, when I deadlifted this past weekend, it was pretty much a squat with the bar in my hand. Torso as upright as my squat, hips very deep. Just messing around with positioning a bit, that’s where I – given my own biomechanics and strengths – felt strongest. I don’t remember noticing my knees being in the way.
A few relevant measurements:
heels to knees: 21"
knees to hip crease: 19"
hip crease to shoulders: 20"
shoulders to center of fist (where the bar would be): 27"
Really just distances between pivot points.
When I squat, the bar is basically loaded in the exact same place over my shoulders.
Here’s a drawing, with my limb proportions. The upper back angle is the same between the first two pictures.
EDIT: I got the lower leg angle a bit off on the 2nd picture, since the weight would still need to be centered mid-foot. Upper body angles would remain the same.
But even so, it looks like there’s almost equal amounts of leg extension and hip extension in the movement, really no different than my squat.
I don’t mean to get overly analytical or to try and prove any point that way.
I guess I’m just saying is… I can’t really feel the difference between the two, and I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong. And if so, what do I need to change (and why)?
You may set up the deadlift like a squat, but as you begin to pull the weight up, the bar (if heavy enough) will naturally travel horizontally, it it is not there already, to a position directly over mid-foot. If your hips are low to begin with as in a squat, they will be forced to shoot up to a higher position so that your shins do not push the bar forward of mid-foot. That is why the setup of a deadlift should initiate this position correctly as not to require wasted effort at the start of the lift. The bar must follow a straight vertical path from mid-foot at the start of the lift to lockout.
[quote]pcdude wrote:
You may set up the deadlift like a squat, but as you begin to pull the weight up, the bar (if heavy enough) will naturally travel horizontally, it it is not there already, to a position directly over mid-foot. If your hips are low to begin with as in a squat, they will be forced to shoot up to a higher position so that your shins do not push the bar forward of mid-foot. That is why the setup of a deadlift should initiate this position correctly as not to require wasted effort at the start of the lift. The bar must follow a straight vertical path from mid-foot at the start of the lift to lockout. [/quote]
And that’s where I’m confused. For almost every video I’ve seen set up low, their hips shoot up and the bar is lifted with their hamstrings.
Except that’s not happening with me. My hips, shoulders and the bar rise as one.
But yeah, probably need a video, since my diagram probably wasn’t clear enough.
[quote]Alrightmiami19c wrote:
From a powerlifting standpoint, with regards to “squatting the weight off the floor,” why increase the range of motion? [/quote]
It’s not increased ROM so much as wasted energy/extraneous movement. The bar still travels from the floor to lockout, though with bad technique you may have a point in that the bar may have to move out and around the knees.
Also worth mentioning: if you squat the bar and try to turn it into a back isometric, you are removing a large group of contributors to the overall summed force. And why would you want to do that?
Post a video from the side, Lorez. If you haven’t seen yourself on film, I would guarantee that the actual mechanics of your deadlift look different than you think.
[quote]HeavyTriple wrote:
Post a video from the side, Lorez. If you haven’t seen yourself on film, I would guarantee that the actual mechanics of your deadlift look different than you think.[/quote]
I am shocked the things I seen n learned from viding my lifts. Things are NOT as they always feel… I will not stop viding my lifts occasionally-pry the best learning tool ive found
[quote]HeavyTriple wrote:
Post a video from the side, Lorez. If you haven’t seen yourself on film, I would guarantee that the actual mechanics of your deadlift look different than you think.[/quote]
I am shocked the things I seen n learned from viding my lifts. Things are NOT as they always feel… I will not stop viding my lifts occasionally-pry the best learning tool ive found[/quote]
Yes!!! I used to think my deadlift was okay then I posted vids of it on this site a couple or so months ago to learn it was a trainwreck. But it’s slowly getting better and better.
And yeah, my legs actually are twice the length of my torso…