Ok, so here are the guidelines. They will get you roundabout into the best position with a little wiggle required to hone it in to your comfort zone. I think first I will go over some mistakes that people make. Some of this I mentioned in the "hips to high" article.
One of the most important things in motor learning is your frame of reference. That is what you you as a benchmark from which your movement is relative. Obviously that may change as a movement progresses but in general, as with anything, a STATIONARY benchmark is best to start with.
One of the most frequent cues you hear in deadlifting is "get your butt higher" or "get your butt lower". To me, one of the WORST ways to cue a deadlift. Let's assume for our purposes that "hips" and "butt" is the same thing, btw, for now. When you tell someone just to move their butt up and down you are having them focus on a MOBILE benchmark and then telling them to move it around! You'll have to have someone tell you where to put your hips about a thousand times before it finally sinks in.
So we want to start with something that is not moving and maintain our setup relative to THAT.
Another big miscue, in my opinion is focusing on the feet or the floor for closed chain movements like this. What you hear is things like "drive your heels into the floor" and "try to push down on the floor". It seems like a good idea but the problem is that focusing on the feet and the floor makes your body want to move down. You are NOT pushing down the floor. You are pulling UP the bar. Although it will require a lot of pushing into the floor, lol, the action that really results in the bar being pulled up is a very powerful hip extension.
Deadlifts are a "hip dominant" movement, not a "knee dominant" movement.
To illustrate this to yourself there is a very simple but very powerful test which is similar to doing a jump. Do this right now as your reading this.
1. Stand up and get yourself into a sort of deadlifting postion. Bring your hips back and place your weight onto your heels.
2. Now VERY SLIGHTLY "push" your heels into the floor. You weight should be on your heels and your hips should be flexed so that your torso is slightly inclined. Basically you should be able to jump forward from this position. So push your heels into the ground just enough so that you feel your glutes and hamstrings engage. You may actually feel as if you can "tense" these muscles a whole lot without actually extending your knees or hips at all.
3. NOW, do something different. Get into the same position as step two. Weight on the heels. But DON'T push your heels into the floor. Instead concentrate on driving your hips and butt forward very slightly and easily. In other words just try to slightly extend (straighten) your hips.
4. If you do this right you should notice a very marvelous thing. In step two, you will probably be able to generate a lot of muscular tension in your legs and really feel as if you are pushing that floor but without actually generating any movement. Yet, in step three you should find it pretty much impossible to try to extend the hips and not end up standing straight up! If your degree of effort is pretty much the same for both things that should tell you something about the relative efficiency of both movements!
The reality is..both efforts SHOULD result in the same thing. But the first method is able to generate a whole lot of muscle tension with no movement whereas the second method results in powerful and fluid movement without a lot of static muscle tension.
With that being said, there MAY be something to say for first driving the heels and then performing a violent hip extension…which is what most people do. Because you generate that tension in the extensors and then your "let it rip". I've never really found it to be more efficient, personally. Albeit with a heavy dead lift you generate a lot of muscular tension, lol, so what I mean is that I don't find it more efficient to use "high tension techniques". If I could guess as to why this is so I'd say that generating the excessive and unneeded tension limits efficient joint movement. In that vane you may notice that step two, if you allow movement, causes a more herky jerky movement, whereas step three, as I said before, causes a fluid movement, and what's more you can hardly avoid this movement occuring with only the slightest application of effort.
Ok, so the other mistake that people make is to take the word "pulling" to literally. This is another reason why focusing on hip drive is so important. What people do is they simply attempt to "pull" the bar off the floor with their shoulders. So it's sort of like they are dong the movement from the top down. Which results in the extreme cases in the "scared cat deadlift" that we see SO often. That's not the only thing that results in it but it's one action that can lead to it.
That's at least a few of the mistakes…
1. Stand with your shins about an inch from the bar with about a hip width stance or slightly wider depending on what works best for you.
2. Look down at the barbell and imagine that there is a vertical line coming up through it so that the line of the barbell is part of an imaginary plane. The barbell and this imaginary line is your reference point or benchmark. You will use this to orient your body to. Remember this if for visualization purposes only.
3. After you grab the bar you will bring your shoulders in front of the bar so that the imaginary line intersects you scapula. In other words, the bar is in line with your scapula. Keeping your shoulders forward of the bar in this postion bring your chest up and shoulders back and locked. Scapula retracted.
4. Hips/Butt: Now that your feet are in the right place and your shoulders are in the right place the trick is to get your hips as close to this imaginary LINE as possible while maintaining your shoulder position. You are NOT bring your hips down toward the bar..you are bringing them forward toward the line coming up through the bar. WITHOUT moving your shoulders back.
All the while the chest must stay OUT and the shoulders back. The lower back must remain in it's tightly set natural arch.
Really, once you hit step three and you are maintaining a good deadlifting position with your lumbar set..you are pretty much there. Step 4 is a very subtle adjustment. If you move your hips down..the shoulders drift behind the bar. If you move your hips too far up the shoulder sink. So "just right" is in between. Correct, as has been said before, means your butt is below your shoulders but above your knees
. That may seem really smart aleck but since you see people try to deadlift with their butt below their knees in the "deadlift as squat" position OR with their butt pretty much level with their shoulders…it needs to be said, apparently.
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