Starting Strength

well except in the bench press.

    Figure 4-43. Eye gaze direction in the deadlift, for neck position safety and balance.

    Keeping your arms straight
     
    Your arms must stay straight during the deadlift. There is no better way to produce a really lovely elbow injury than to let 500 pounds straighten out your elbows for you. The physics of this is not difficult to understand. The force produced by the hips and legs is transmitted up the rigid torso, across the scapulas, and down the arms to the bar. Seen from the side, the shoulders will be in front of the bar and the arms themselves will not be vertical, but they must be straight.
    Just as the back must stay locked to facilitate force transfer, the elbows must stay straight during this whole process, too. A bent elbow is a thing that can be straightened out, if the weight is heavy enough, and the straightening out is done by force that should have gotten to the bar. Deadlifting with bent elbows is like towing a car with a spring instead of with a chain: the chain transfers all the pull to the car, whereas the spring absorbs some of the force as it changes length. The elbow is flexed by the muscles of the forearm, the brachialis, and the biceps. If your elbows are bent, these muscles are working unnecessarily, since they add nothing to the lift; in fact, bent elbows actually increase the distance the bar has to travel because they cause the bar to lock out at an unnecessarily higher position. It is important to convince yourself that your arms are not involved in the deadlift and that straight elbows are the best way to pull. This will also be important when you learn how to power clean.
     

    Figure 4-44. Bent elbows in the deadlift are the fault of the part of the brain that tells you that “All things must be lifted with the arms.” In a deadlift, the only function of the arms is to connect the shoulders to the bar; straight arms must be learned early so that this very bad habit does not become embedded.

    Finishing the lift
     
    Once the bar has completed the trip up the legs, there are several ways you can finish the deadlift, only one of them correct. You lock out the bar by lifting your chest and bringing your knees, hips, and lumbar spine into extension simultaneously. Many people insist on exaggerating some of these things, performing the movement inefficiently and, if the exaggerations are carried to the extreme, unsafely. For example, you don’t need to roll your shoulders up and back at the top, creating an active concentric shrug. The deadlift is not finished until the shoulders are back and the chest is up, and finishing this part of the movement is important. But the traps get sufficient work from their isometric role in heavy deadlifts without your attempting to add additional trap work by exaggerating the shrug and possibly causing a neck injury in the process. Heavy barbell shrugs are a good assistance exercise for an advanced lifter who knows how to perform them correctly, but novice deadlifters have no business trying to add an extra movement to an exercise that is sufficient without it.
    Likewise, it is unnecessary and unwise to exaggerate the hip-extension part of the lockout into a lumbar overextension ( Figure 4-45 ). Since it is virtually impossible to overextend your hip joints in an upright position with a loaded bar lying on the anterior side of the thighs, what actually happens is that you overextend the lumbar spine, sometimes as almost a separate movement after the deadlift is actually finished. This is a very dangerous habit to acquire: uneven loading of the lumbar discs is as harmful from the posterior as it is from the anterior.

    Figure 4-45. An overzealous lockout that produces lumbar hyperextension is both dangerous and unnecessary.

    Figure 4-46. Unnecessary arching, as shown in Figure 4-45 , asymmetrically loads the spine to the posterior, setting up the conditions that may result in disc or facet joint injury.

    Knees sometimes get forgotten in the rush to lock everything out from the hips up. Many contest deadlifts have been red-lighted because of the lifter’s failure to lock out the knees. This always produces a flurry of bad language from the lifter when the lights are explained to him, because anybody who can lock out a 622-pound deadlift can also straighten out his knees the final 5 degrees. Once the deadlift is finished at the top, it requires no more work – you just have to remember to lock your knees out. Make