The Art of the Deadlift Revealed - Gain Real Muscle Mass!

Hey there guys, Brian Kramer here for MuscleLibraryTV.com and thanks again for joining us today. Today we're going to show you why you should perform the deadlift and how to do it correctly to get the best results for your efforts. Now if you research a dead lift you're going to find that there's really a scary amount of variations out there. There's stiff legged deadlifts, sumo style deadlifts, Romanian, partial, box deadlifts and the conventional or narrow stance deadlift. So you can understand why people really can't get a grasp on how they should perform this exercise correctly and the clear reason as to why they should be doing them. Well today we're going to show you the perfect technique for performing the conventional or narrow stand deadlift. Our goal with this movement is to stimulate more muscle than any other exercise in your routine. This movement is going to hit your upper back, lower back, traps, glutes and legs. Now this narrow stance deadlift is an awesome overall body mass builder, and it's going to help you to build real back thickness and overall body power. So let's head out to the gym guys and see how this movement is done. To set up for the deadlift you want to start off by standing over a barbell loaded with the weight that you plan to use with your feet about shoulder width apart and your toes pointed straight ahead. Bend your knees, lean forward and grasp the bar with a shoulder width, state your grip just a bit wider than your stance is. Position yourself so your shins are up against the bar, your hips are held high and your shoulder blades are positioned directly over the barbell or slightly in front of it. So you want to make sure that you keep your head up and your back flat, because rounding your back will do nothing but lead to injury. Begin the lift by driving with your legs. Straighten up and then at the top of the movement, throw your chest out and your shoulders back and squeeze. I try to visualize myself coming to attention and saluting while squeezing my shoulder blades back together. Anyways, when you are at the very top part of the movement and you are standing erect, the bar is going to be resting up against the middle part of your thighs. The descend is essentially just reversing the movement, but make sure you go in a nice, slow and controlled fashion. Notice the path that the bar follows on the way down. You'll notice that the bar follows the thigh, goes over the knee and drags down along the shin until it reaches the floor. Once it reaches the floor you want to allow the bar to settle before going into the next rep. Each rep should begin from a dead stop. Don't try and bounce the weights off of the floor to gain momentum and cheat. From that dead stop you want to explosively power up, dragging the bar up along your body until you are at the top again. Now hold it there for a count and really squeeze your back, legs and glutes together. Whatever you do, don't use the top part of the movement for relaxing. This should be the part of the movement when you are reaching peak contraction and really flexing hard to stress those muscle fibers deep down. So for other variations of the deadlift like the stiff legged deadlift or the Romanian deadlift, you should keep some space between the bar and your legs during the entire movement. But for the deadlift that we are doing today, the bar should basically remain in contact with your legs throughout the entire movement. Now, an easy way to tell if your form is up to par and that you're keeping the bar in contact with your legs, is how your shins and thighs and legs feel and look after you are doing this exercise. So what I mean by that is you are literally going to have red marks running up and down along the front of your legs, and it's going to kind of feel like you've got rug burn in that area. And if you have shorts on, you might notice a little bit of scraped skin and bleeding, but it's all going to be worth it in the end. So one little trick though is if you want to ease some of the abrasions that you are getting, put a little baby powder on the front part of your thighs, knees or shins which will basically help lubricate the bar going up and down your legs. So two of the most common mistakes that we see people making when deadlifting is rounding their backs over in a hunchback style and then trying to pull the barbell off the ground with their arms. Your arms do nothing in aiding this movement all they do is hold onto the weight, while the rest of your body really is doing all the work. So keep your lower back arched or flat, and your upper back flat and use your legs, glutes and lower back muscles to help drive the weight off the floor and take your arms totally out of the movement and try to keep them perfectly straight. Earlier we spoke about keeping your hips held high when setting up for the deadlift. Starting with your hips at an optimal height is imperative to a big pull and a strong and safe pull. So in order to illustrate what hips held high means, let's take a look at when held a little bit too low and compared to when held high which is going to be ideal starting position. When you are in the correct starting position, your hips are held high and your shoulders are directly over the bar, or sometimes slightly in front of it, which is great. When you are in the correct starting position and you start the pull, the transfer of your power will immediately and efficiently pull the bar off the floor with no wasted energy. Basically if you could see the exact moment when the bar comes off the floor and where your hips are positioned in that moment, that needs to be your starting point for the movement every time you perform it. So you can see here that when the hips are too low, your shoulders are a little bit behind the bar, which signifies that you are out of position. Now what happens is, when you start the movement, your shoulders will want to shift forward to get over the bar to pull it vertically off the floor. So the result is wasted effort and energy, because you are out of position to start out with, the efficiently pull the barbell off the floor. As you probably noticed, we are using a staggered grip with this movement. The reason we are using a staggered lift is because some lifters have a little bit of trouble with their grip when working with some of their maximum poundage. So to help battle this, we stagger our grip. Now what happens, is if the bar starts to slides out of one end, it seems to kind of slide into the other hand which is facing the opposite direction and together, it helps to keep us from worrying about our grip slipping. But to guarantee this, I really like to use grips and straps. So what you want for this movement is that your dominate hand is placed palms down and your weaker hand palms up. And so since I'm right handed, you can see my right hand is pronated. Now one question that you might have is exactly how far apart should I placing my hands on the bar? Now this depends on how far apart your feet are, the reason being is that you want the inner part of your forearms to be flush against the outside of your leg at the beginning part of the movement. So to finish up here, let's go over some of the key take-aways of this movement. First, position your feet shoulder width apart, with the inner part of your arms touching the outsides of your legs. Then take a staggered or mixed grip on the bar, start with the bar right up against your shins, to give your arms the strongest and safest pulling position. Keep your hips held high with your shoulders positioned over the bar. Keep your back flat and chest up. Take a deep breath and hold it on the acceleration upward, keep your arms straight. Drag the bar up your legs and at the top of the movement, focus on squeezing your back, legs and glutes hard, almost rocking back before lowering the weight again. Lastly, let the bar settle for a count before going into the next rep. Remember the deadlift is a great overall mass builder and a true test of strength. For the purpose of building muscle, we like to usually keep our working sets in the 6-12 rep range. So warm up well and get ready, because the deadlift will demand a lot out of you, but give you amazing mass building results. So thanks for hanging out with us today. 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