Starting Strength

eyes on a point on the floor about 10 feet in front of you.
    The whole point of the RDL is that the back stays locked in extension while the hip extensors work. Unlock your knees so that a little tension comes into the quads, but no more than enough to lower the bar an inch or two down the thighs. Very little knee-angle change should occur, although the knee position over the feet will change slightly. This position will place your knees above a point about halfway between the toes and the instep. Lift your chest up and arch your low back into a tight lock, trying to maintain this position for the whole movement. Start the bar down your thighs by shoving your hips back, allowing your hips to come into flexion with the bar never leaving the skin of the legs. At the same time, push your shoulders forward, out in front of the bar, to the familiar pulling position. As the bar approaches your knees, shove them back, too, shifting the shins into a vertical position. Drop the bar down past your knees, keeping it in close contact with the shins, and go as low as possible without unlocking your lower back . Stop just before your back begins to unlock – a position you will identify on the first few reps – and start back up. The stretch at the bottom should help change the direction of the bar without any pause. On the way up, keep the bar in contact with your legs and keep your chest and back locked in position. Breathe at the top, taking a big breath for every rep.

    Figure 7-25. The Romanian deadlift.

    The emphasis on driving everything back is very important; the use of the hips instead of the knees is what engages the hip extensors and excludes the quads. It helps to think about the weight shifting back to the heels, the knees moving back, the bar being shoved back to stay in contact with the legs, and the butt moving back; in fact, everything moves back except the shoulders, which slide forward, out over the bar. The shins must come to vertical before the bar reaches the knees, and the knees must never move forward at all after the initial unlocking. Any forward knee movement puts the quads in a position to contribute to the movement by extending the knees on the way back up, canceling out the desired hip-extension effect.

    Figure 7-26. The progression from top to bottom in the RDL. Note that the hip-angle change is predominantly responsible for the ROM of the exercise.

    The most common error will be the knees-forward problem. You will be tempted to relax the tension on your knees at the bottom; the hamstring tension builds all the way down and is not relieved until the muscles are shortened, either by having done the work of extending the hips at the top or by your relaxing your knees forward at the bottom. If you shorten the hamstrings by allowing the knees to drop forward – thus flexing the knees and causing the two ends of the hamstrings to come together, taking the tension off from the bottom – then the quads will do the work that the hamstrings should have done when they extend the knees during the recovery to the top.
    Remember from the discussion of pulling mechanics in the Deadlift chapter that the shoulders stay in front of the bar. This means that the arms are inclined back from the shoulders at a slight angle, with the lats pulling back on the humerus to keep the bar over the mid-foot. The lower the bar goes down your legs without your knees bending, the more angle your arms must assume to keep the bar over the mid-foot, and the more work the lats must do to maintain this position. At a very low position on the shins, this angle becomes quite extreme, contributing to the difficulty involved in doing a strict RDL very far below the knees. In fact, if you touch the floor at the bottom of an RDL, you are probably doing it with a fairly light weight.
    Also common is the failure to hold the back rigid in absolute extension. One of the main benefits of the RDL is the isometric work it provides for the erectors, as they hold the spine rigid while the hamstrings extend the hips. This back position is rather hard to hold, and the lifter needs a lot of concentration to keep the chest up and the low back arched with no looseness, while sliding the hips back, the knees back, the bar back, the heels down, and the shoulders forward. For a slow exercise, the RDL is technically difficult because it is very easy to do wrong. If the back rounds or the knees come forward, less work is being done by the targeted muscle