The deadlift is a hip hinge: you bend at the hips, keep the bar close to your body, and stand up by driving your hips forward. Good form comes down to five checkpoints, in order: setup, grip, brace, pull, and lockout. Here's what each one should look and feel like.
the setup
Walk up to the bar until it's over your midfoot, the middle of your foot, not your toes or your heel. Your shins should be close enough to touch it.
From there:
- Feet about hip-width apart, toes turned slightly out
- Grip the bar just outside your legs
- Bend at the hips first, then the knees, until your hands reach the bar
- Shoulders end up slightly ahead of the bar, not stacked directly over it
- Hips sit higher than your knees and lower than your shoulders
This position looks different from a squat, and that's the point. A squat starts with your hips low. A deadlift starts with your hips higher, because your legs aren't doing the same job here. Your hips and hamstrings are.
If the bar starts too far from your shins, everything after this point compounds the error. Your shoulders drift forward, your back angle steepens, and the bar has a longer path to travel before it even leaves the floor.
your grip
Double overhand, both palms facing you, works for most working sets. It's simple and symmetrical, and there's no reason to complicate it while the weight is manageable.
Once the bar gets heavy enough that your grip starts to fail before your legs and back do, a mixed grip helps: one palm forward, one palm back. The rotated hand stops the bar from rolling out of your grip the way it can with two matching palms. Some lifters alternate which hand goes which way from session to session to keep the load even.
A hook grip, where your thumb sits under your fingers, does the same job as a mixed grip without the asymmetry, but it takes practice and isn't comfortable for everyone right away. Double overhand is the right starting point either way.
brace before you pull
Take a breath into your stomach and brace like you're about to take a punch. Set that brace while the bar is still on the floor, before you start to pull.
A solid brace keeps your torso rigid through the entire pull. You'll feel the difference: a good brace makes the bar feel connected to your body, like part of the same system, rather than something your arms are wrestling with alone.
Hold that brace through the pull. Breathe out once the bar is back down and you're resetting for the next rep. Some lifters take a fresh breath and re-brace between every single rep, even inside a set of five. That's normal. A brace that holds for one clean rep isn't guaranteed to carry the next one without a reset.
the pull
Push the floor away with your legs. The bar should stay close to your shins and thighs the entire way up, close enough that it grazes your legs on the way.
Your hips and shoulders rise at the same rate. This is the part beginners get wrong most often: the hips shoot up first, the shoulders lag behind, and the bar ends up looping around the knees instead of traveling in a straight line. If that happens, the weight you're pulling gets harder to control for no reason other than the bar took a longer path than it needed to.
Keep your back angle roughly the same until the bar clears your knees. From there, drive your hips forward and finish standing tall.
lockout
Stand fully upright, hips extended, shoulders back. That's the lockout, and it's also the end of the rep.
Don't lean back past vertical or squeeze your glutes into a hard hyperextension at the top. The lift is finished once your hips and knees are straight and your shoulders are stacked over them. Anything past that is extra motion that doesn't add anything to the rep.
the checklist, in one pass
Run through these five checkpoints on every rep, especially early on when the pattern isn't automatic yet:
- Setup: bar over your midfoot, shins nearly touching it.
- Grip: double overhand, just outside your legs.
- Brace: a breath and a brace, taken before the bar moves.
- Pull: bar stays close, hips and shoulders rise together.
- Lockout: stand tall, hips through, no hyperextension.
common mistakes
- starting with the bar too far from your shins. Everything after setup gets harder to fix once this is wrong.
- rounding the lower back. Keep it neutral from setup to lockout. A rounded back lets the bar drift away from your legs, which makes the same weight feel heavier.
- hips shooting up first. The bar drifts around your knees instead of traveling straight up.
- losing your brace mid-rep. Take the brace before the bar leaves the floor and hold it through the whole rep.
- bar drifting away from your body. Every inch of separation between the bar and your legs makes the same weight feel heavier.
how much should a beginner deadlift
Start light enough that you can run through all five checkpoints without rushing any of them. The exact number on the bar matters less than whether your form holds at the top of your rep range.
Once you can hit every rep cleanly across your working sets, add weight: 5 to 10 pounds is a reasonable jump for the deadlift, since a small percentage of the total bar weight is hard to feel on a lift this heavy. If your form starts breaking down at the new weight, that's your signal to hold there for another session before adding more.
what to log
Log your working weight, sets, and reps. That's what tells you whether the pattern is getting stronger over time.
A simple log might read: 135 lb, 3 sets of 5, every rep clean. Next session, that's the number you're chasing again, or 5 to 10 pounds more if last time's log shows every rep hit the top of your range with good form. One session doesn't tell you much on its own. A few weeks of logs strung together do.
Arc tracks every deadlift session and tells you when you're ready to add weight, so the five checkpoints above stay the focus in the gym while the numbers get handled for you.
build a deadlift that gets stronger every week
Arc tracks your working sets and tells you exactly when to add weight next.
