Australian Strength Coach

Check out my simple fix to stop the hips rising up first in the deadlift.

In this session, I was training with elite calisthenics athlete

Deadlifting isn’t part of his sport, but we thought it would be a cool lift to get good at.

Everything looked perfect on the lighter warm-up sets, but as soon as the weight got heavier, his hips started rising before the bar left the floor.

My first thought was that he wasn’t taking the slack out of the bar properly, which is a very common cause of this issue. But after a few sets, it became obvious that wasn’t the only problem.

The biggest issue was that his lats weren’t fully engaged.

One of my favourite ways to teach lat engagement is to pull the bar into your shins and keep pulling it backwards throughout the entire lift.

The lats help lock the torso in place, allowing the legs to drive into the floor without the hips changing position.

To make this easier, we put knee sleeves over his shins so that he could pull the bar into his shins without making his shins bleed or bruise.

The difference was immediate. His body locked into position, his hips stayed where they belonged, and the movement instantly became stronger.

If your hips shoot up early in the deadlift, try this cue to help you learn how to use your lats. Pull the bar into your shins from start to finish, but make sure you put the knee sleeves on first, and feel the difference.

Low bar squats aren’t ONLY for powerlifters.

There are squats designed to lift the most weight, squats designed to build bigger quads, and squats designed to build bigger glutes. The stance, torso angle, head position, and bar position should all support that objective.

In this example, the goal was glute development.

To maximise glute involvement, I want to maximise hip flexion. The glutes are responsible for hip extension, so creating a larger moment arm at the hip joint increases the demand placed on them.

One of the best ways to achieve this is with a slightly narrower stance and by pushing the hips further back. This naturally creates a greater forward torso lean.

The interesting part is that she was already doing a lot of that exceptionally well.

Head down. Chest down. Hips back. Close stance.

The only thing I changed was the bar position.

A lot of people think the low bar squat is only for powerlifters trying to lift the most weight. While it’s true that a low bar position is fantastic for moving heavy loads, it also complements a glute-dominant squat perfectly.

A low bar position allows the torso to lean forward more naturally and comfortably, while a high bar position tends to encourage a more upright posture which is where I would want to be if my goal was to develop quads.

So this wasn’t about fixing a bad squat.
It was about taking an already excellent squat and making it even more specific to the goal.

This is an extremely common issue when weightlifters learn the low bar squat for the first time.

He has great mobility and can sit arse to grass easily. And this is necessary for high bar, Olympic lifting style squats.

In weightlifting movements, (cleans and snatches) the goal is to be more upright which allows maximum knee bend where the hamstrings press into the calves. You sit as deep as mobility allows and rebound off that contact. This keeps the hips under the bar which reduces tension from the hips and places the load onto the knees, which is why weightlifters all have great quads.

In a low bar squat, you want more involvement from the hips, and we do that by pushing the hips back which slightly takes the load away from the knees and more towards the hips which are a stronger structure.

One of my go to cues when teaching low bar is combining “push the hips back” with a physical reference. I place my hand on the lower back and cue the lifter to drive my hand up. That instantly shifts the focus from quads to hips.

The next layer is where the rebound comes from. Instead of bouncing when the hamstrings hit the calves, I cue them to feel the stretch around the hips, mainly the adductors, and rebound off that stretch instead of hamstring on calf contact.

As soon as he drove my hand up and bounced off the end range tension of the hips, his squat got stronger immediately.

The goal isn’t to cut squat depth. It will be less vertical, which makes it look like we aren’t going as deep, but instead of maximally bending knees, we aim to maximise depth at the hip joint.