Thanks for the follow up. Barring some odd injury/disability deads are one of the best exercises you can do if you care about size or strength so it is something an intermediate or advanced exerciser would want to be very familiar with.
When people talk about not squatting their deadlift, they mean don’t get your hips too low. Attached is a picture of the bottom of the squat, you want to avoid that position in a deadlift. Attached is the picture of the start of a conventional deadlift, essentially the hips never get lower than they would in a half squat (hip position will vary from person to person but will be about that range give or take a bit). If you actually try to squat your deadlift you will have to front raise it out in front of you to maintain your position, and of course you can’t front raise a heavy deadlift so it doesn’t work. In a deadlift the trunk will incline much more forward than in a squat.
FYI a stiff legged deadlift is trunk extension (just like a regular deadlift) because your trunk moves, hip extension means your thigh is what is moving (as in a reverse hyper extension or the way your thigh moves in a squat/lunge/etc). If you are familiar with stiff legged deadlifts then just think about “cheating” and using you legs while you do that, you would bend them a little bit but not a huge amount. That is a conventional deadlift.
Your hips come up a bit too soon at the start. Your hips and shoulders should rise at the same time. Quite the opposite of what you were thinking perhaps? Good pull nonetheless.
Well that certainly looked nothing like a squat, so hopefully that’s no longer a talking point.
I’m glad you took a vid of a heavy weight, that’s certainly the best way to see where your weak points are. You can do a lot of things with a light barbell that you can’t do with a heavy one. I can make a deadlift look like a squat when 135 is on the bar. That isn’t happening with 400 . It’s why I don’t like teaching power cleans with an unloaded barbell once I’ve gotten past the basic instruction. Nothing makes sense until you actually feel the leverages.
Regarding your hips shooting up at the beginning before the bar moves: I don’t think this is a problem. It basically means that you were out of position for your leverages/strenghts at the start, and your body is not able to initiate the pull from that position. If you had just set up with higher hips, it would have looked more fluid.
That lift was solid (and not squat style at all). I think you could bring your stance in (do you jump from that position or do you go narrower?) and your grip in a bit. Try to start with the bar another 2" closer to your shins, right now it is too close to your toes (imagine you had shoes on, you want the bar to be over the knot in the laces, not over where the laces start on the shoe). That is why it seemed slow to come off the ground. Nice lift
It’s a little ironic how the entire thread was based around a question that turns out to be irrelevant. I clearly wasn’t using enough weight before, and/or was relying too much on how it ‘felt’.
I’ll work on my setup – hips higher, closer to the bar, narrower stance – and see how that affects things.
