All Things Deadlift

I hope we all know what deadlifts are. I didn’t train any legs at all in the gym until about 2004 / 2005 and I have no plausible reason for it. I was training more for upper body size and vanity I suppose and my legs are naturally big anyway so that was good enough for me.

Now I don’t go a week without deadlifting and neither should you.

They train multiple strength qualities but the biggest 2 are maximal strength and rate of force development.

I’ll use a car as an analogy here so I hope it works. Strength is your horse power and dictates how much potential you have to be fast and explosive.

Rate of force development is how fast you can go from 0 to 100 as in a lead from a dead stop position or jumping straight up in the air to mark.

To be your best you want both of these, not just one which a lot of players have.

It also hammers the posterior chain which refers to the glutes and hamstrings as well providing the highest of anti flexion core stimulation you’ll find so it really does build the “engine room” (hips/core) all at once and efficiency is what you should be aiming for with all of your training.

There is also some high quality grip work which will aid in tackling and it teaches you to tense up the entire body tensed up to lay harder tackles and to also break and shrug tackles.

A lot of players squat but they are very quad dominant meaning they will stress the knees a fair bit on top of 3 solid running sessions a week at least.

If you’ve never done deadlifts before then there a few things you MUST get it down pat to get the most out of them and to keep yourself from blowing out your back. Deadlifts aren’t bad for the back, bad deadlifts are bad for the back. Below are some videos that go through intra abdominal bracing to get your core and lats set for deadlifts and I’ll also go through a progression of the deadlift variations that you can use. 

Below you’ll find a step by step video guide to deadlifting. Video 1 talks about the action of hip hinging that is the major difference between a squat and a deadlift movement pattern. Video 2 talks about intrabdominal pressure which refers to getting your core and lats set during the set up of a deadlift. Video 3 demonstrates a progression of deadlift variations that you can use if you haven’t done them before.

Video 1 - Hip Hinge Technique

Video 2 - Intra Abdominal Pressure Bracing

Video 3 – Deadlift Progression Variations

If you're in Melbourne then I'll be running the Off Season Training Camp again this summer. As our my footy team's season will end after the last round. I hope to be getting started in September but you can start whenever your season finishes.

It will be even bigger then last year that's for sure!!