Starting Strength

your rib cage up so that your chest rotates up between your arms. Let this contraction continue down your back until your lumbar spine is tightened into contraction as well. In this way, your back is properly positioned for you to pull without dropping your hips – the back will have positioned itself correctly so you can pull from the top down instead of by lowering the hips, which would shove the bar forward. DO NOT try to squeeze your shoulder blades together in the back; scapular adduction will pull you down closer to the bar into a position that you cannot maintain with a heavy weight because that’s not where your shoulder blades actually stay during a pull. When you are in the correct position, stare at a point 12–15 feet in front of you on the floor so that your neck can assume its normal anatomical position. You might need to think about keeping your chin down, too.
    This step will be difficult because of hamstring tension fighting against the proper extension of the lower back. Remember: The back muscles and the hamstrings are in a war for control over your pelvic position, and the lower back must win. During this step, most people will try to drop their hips. If you do this, the bar will roll forward of the mid-foot. Your hips will probably be higher than you want them, especially if you have been deadlifting using another method. Keep your hips up, and compensate for this weird feeling by squeezing the chest up even more. After you do a few deadlifts and your hamstrings get warm, the movement will feel better and more familiar.
     
    Step 5: Pull
     
    Take a big breath and drag the bar up your legs. This means exactly what it says: “drag” implies contact, and the bar never leaves contact with your legs on the way up to lockout. This step will be the first time that the bar actually moves at all, and if you do it correctly, the bar path will be a straight vertical line, starting at its position directly over the mid-foot and ending at the top at arms’ length with your chest up, knees and hips in extension, spine in the normal anatomical position, and feet flat on the floor. If at any time during the pull the bar leaves your legs – which often happens as the bar gets above the knees and near the thighs – it will be off balance, forward of your mid-foot.
    If the bar loses contact with your shins as you start the pull, it has traveled forward. Leaving the bar out away from the legs may be due to the perfectly natural desire not to scrape the shins, but the bar must remain close to the legs to avoid getting it out of balance. Make up your mind that you’re going to keep it close, and wear sweats or thin shin guards to protect your shins if you have to. If the bar moves forward anyway and you’re sure you are squeezing your chest up, chances are that you were not in balance over the mid-foot when you started the pull. This problem is commonly encountered with people who are wearing weightlifting shoes with heels that are too tall, or with people who have long legs and a short back. If this happens, you will need to insert another step, Step 4.5: before you start the pull, get your weight back off of your toes . Don’t exaggerate this by trying to get back on your heels; just rock back a little and get the weight off of your toes and back onto your mid-foot, and then think about pushing the mid-foot straight down into the floor.
    At the top of the pull, just lift your chest. That’s all; don’t shrug your shoulders either up or back, and don’t lean back. Just raise the chest. Seen from the side, this position will be anatomically normal, with both lordotic and kyphotic curves in unexaggerated positions, your eyes looking slightly down, your hips and knees fully extended, and your shoulders back. This is the position your body must assume to safely bear weight, and the correct back position during the pull provides a safe way to transfer the load from the ground to this upright position. Refer to Figure 4-12, 5d , for this position.
    Down should be the perfect opposite of up, the only difference being that the bar can go down faster than it went up. It is just as easy to injure the back by setting the bar down incorrectly as it is by picking the bar up incorrectly, and it is extremely common to set the bar down wrong, with a round back and the knees forward, even if you have pulled it correctly off the floor. A non-vertical bar path makes no more sense on the way down than it does on the way