How to Deadlift Properly: The Honest Setup, the Four Real Mistakes, and Whether You Need To

You've got 100 kg on the bar, your phone propped against a dumbbell rack, and a slow-motion replay of your last set that you've now watched six times. Somewhere around the second rep your lower back does a thing. You're not sure if it's a bad thing.

The comments under every deadlift video say two contradictory things with equal confidence: any rounding will destroy your spine, and everyone rounds, stop being soft.

Both are wrong in the way that unhelpful advice is usually wrong — they're describing a photo instead of a movement.

Deadlifting properly comes down to three things: the bar starts over the middle of your foot, your spine holds one position from start to finish rather than changing shape mid-lift, and your hips move backward before they move down. Get those and technique stops being a daily anxiety. Everything else is detail.

Key numbers

• 20 kg (45 lb) is a standard men's barbell; a women's bar is 15 kg with a thinner 25 mm grip that's easier to hold.
• 450 mm plates — full-size competition plates — put the bar about 22 cm (8.75 in) off the floor. That height is a piece of equipment convention, not a natural starting position.
• Bar over midfoot, about 2.5 cm (1 inch) from your shins. This is the single position that fixes the most technique problems at once.
• 3–6 reps per working set, 1–2 sessions a week, is where nearly everyone should live. Deadlifts generate fatigue out of proportion to their set count.
• Zero is a legitimate number of deadlifts to do per week if the movement doesn't suit your body.

What does the correct setup look like, step by step?

Set up the same way every rep, in this order. The sequence matters more than the individual cues.

1. Stand with the bar over midfoot, feet about hip-width, toes slightly out. Look down: the bar should visually cut your shoelaces.
2. Hinge and grip, hands just outside your legs. Don't move the bar toward you — move yourself to the bar.
3. Pull your chest up and set your lats. Imagine squeezing an orange in each armpit. This is what stops your upper back collapsing forward.
4. Let your shins come to the bar as your hips settle. Hips end higher than in a squat, lower than a stiff-leg. There's no universal angle; your leg lengths decide it.
5. Brace before you pull. Big breath into the belly, then tense your midsection like you're about to take a punch. Hold that breath through the rep.
6. Push the floor away. The cue is a leg press, not a back extension. The bar drags up your legs and stays in contact with them.

Caveat: everybody's setup looks slightly different because everybody's femur-to-torso ratio is different. Copying a lifter with your build helps more than copying a champion.

What does "neutral spine" actually mean?

Neutral spine doesn't mean flat, and it doesn't mean pretty. It means the shape of your spine at rep start is the shape at lockout. Position held, not position perfected.

Here's the mechanism worth knowing. Your spine on its own is a stack of blocks that buckles under load. What supports it is pressure — you brace, your abdominal wall tightens, and the pressurized trunk becomes a rigid cylinder that transfers force from your legs to the bar. The bracing is the safety feature. The exact curve is secondary.

That reframes the rounding question. A back that's slightly rounded and stays there is doing its job. A back that changes shape under load is the problem — that's the vertebrae moving while compressed, and it's where injuries cluster. Slight upper-back rounding is common in strong pullers. Lower-back flexion that increases as the bar leaves the floor is your signal to strip weight.

Caveat: pain is data, not weakness. A back that feels wrong two days after every session isn't asking for better cues, it's asking for a break and possibly a physio.

How do you learn the hip hinge?

The hinge is the actual skill, and it's separate from the barbell. Most bad deadlifts are squats performed on a bar that's too low.

Learn it in two minutes:

• Wall drill. Stand a foot from a wall, facing away. Push your hips straight back until your glutes touch, keeping your shins nearly vertical. That backward travel is the hinge — knees bend a little, hips do the work.
• Dowel drill. Hold a broomstick vertically along your spine, touching the back of your head, your upper back, and your tailbone. Hinge. If any contact point lifts off, your spine moved.
• Then load it. Romanian deadlifts with light dumbbells teach the same pattern with far less at stake than a loaded barbell.

The difference in one line: in a squat, your hips travel down. In a hinge, they travel back.

The four mistakes that show up in almost every video

Nearly every problem I see is one of these, and they're all setup problems wearing a costume.

• Jerking the bar off the floor. Slack in the bar plus a sudden yank equals a spine catching load it wasn't braced for. Pull the slack out first — you'll hear a soft click — then push.
• Hips shooting up first. Your legs stopped contributing and your lower back is now doing the lift alone. Usually means the weight is too heavy or the hips started too low.
• Bar drifting away from your legs. Every centimetre forward makes the lift heavier by lengthening the lever. Keep the bar dragging your shins and thighs the whole way.
• Leaning back at lockout. Standing up straight is lockout. Hyperextending adds nothing and compresses the exact structures you're protecting. Finish tall, glutes squeezed, ribs down.

One more thing that quietly fixes three of those four: reset every rep. Lower the bar under control, let it settle on the floor, take a fresh breath, re-set your lats, then pull again. Touch-and-go reps are faster and they let you bounce out of a position you never actually braced. Dead-stop reps are honest reps — each one starts from the same setup you rehearsed, which means your fifth rep looks like your first instead of like a rescue.

Do you actually need to deadlift?

Honestly, no — and this is where a lot of coaching gets dogmatic. The deadlift trains your hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors, and grip better than almost anything. It is not the only route to any of those.

Option	Trains	Best for
Conventional deadlift	Whole posterior chain, grip	Average or long-armed lifters
Trap-bar deadlift	Same, more quad, less spinal load	Long femurs, back issues, beginners
Romanian deadlift	Hamstrings, glutes	Anyone chasing muscle over max strength
Hip thrust + back extension	Glutes, erectors	People who hinge badly under fatigue

If conventional pulls consistently hurt, switch — that's not quitting, it's picking a tool that fits your leverages. Trap-bar pulls in particular give most of the benefit at a fraction of the technical risk.

The bottom line

Bar over midfoot. Lats set. Brace hard, hold the shape you started in, push the floor away. Keep the reps low and the sessions few, and film yourself from the side at 45 degrees rather than from the front, where nothing useful is visible.

Also worth saying: a bigger deadlift is a health and capability win, not a social one. Nobody meeting you can see your numbers — what they read in the first second is posture, build, and presentation together. That's the part you can't judge from inside your own mirror, and it's what our free perception test measures on a 70–155 scale, no paywall after you upload. Pair it with the push pull legs split for structure, body fat and first impressions for the composition side, and the male glow-up guide for everything the barbell can't touch.