Australian Strength Coach

Anxiety around heavy deadlifts usually starts when you begin thinking about the weight instead of the process.

As the bar gets heavier, people hesitate. They grab the bar and start asking themselves:

“Can I actually lift this?”

That’s the worst time to have that conversation.

Make the decision to lift the weight before you approach the bar. Get your head right, create the arousal you need, and commit to the lift.

Then walk up and execute the exact same process you’ve used from your first warm-up to your heaviest set:

Same stance.
Same hand position.
Same body position.
Same brace.
Same drive.

The weight changes. The process doesn’t.

In my experience, the deadlift benefits more than any other lift from high levels of neural arousal. You can often produce significantly more force simply by getting your head into the right state.

But the psych up happens before you approach the bar.

Once you’re there, there’s no more thinking.

Set up. Brace. Drive.

Stop rocking back too far when you deadlift.

A common technical flaw I see with deadlifts is people sitting too deep into their deadlift setup. Usually, they’re trying to make it feel more like a squat, but the problem is the leverage is completely wrong.

A sign to look for is shoulder position. If your shoulders are behind the bar, the bar cannot come off the ground efficiently from that position. There’s no leverage for the bar to travel straight up.

If you let go of the bar in your start position, would you fall over?

The answer should be no.

You should feel balanced, stable, and ready to push the world away. But if your shoulders are behind the bar, you’d fall backwards if you let go, you’re sitting too deep.

Another easy checkpoint is from the side view. The arms should be completely vertical. This tells us the hips are at the right height, the shoulders are in the correct position, and you’re set up to move the bar with the best possible leverage.

Coach Bella Wellness & Training already had a very good squat. Great mobility, great coordination and great technique.

But my seminars are often about refining the small details.

The first thing we changed was her bar position.

A common mistake with low bar squats is placing the bar too low down the back. It can initially feel easier, but the bar should still be supported by the shelf created by the rear delts. If you go below that you start supporting the bar through the arms, creating unnecessary stress through the shoulders and elbows, but it also causes the lifter to tip too far forward to balance the bar on the back and it eventually turns into a good morning squat.

I cue the elbows back to engage the rear delts and create a strong, secure shelf for the barbell to sit on.

But there’s another piece to this.

Creating that aggressive upper-back position can cause some lifters to excessively arch their spine and anteriorly tilt their pelvis. This can restrict available hip flexion and ultimately make it harder to achieve good squat depth.

So we need to separate the two:

Strong upper-back brace. Neutral pelvis.

My cue for the pelvis is “Piss up a wall.”

This takes the lifter out of anterior pelvic tilt. I’ll also use the cue “ribs down.” They’re essentially two ways of influencing the same relationship, bringing the ribs and pelvis into a better stacked position rather than exaggerating arch.

With Bella, those two small adjustments made a big difference.

Bar on the rear delts.
Elbows back.
Ribs down.
Pelvis neutral.

The result was a secure upper-back position, better depth and a much cleaner low bar squat.

Well done, Coach Bella.

In this bench press masterclass with Jaden Laing , we broke down how to build a more efficient powerlifting style bench press from the ground up.

Jaden is already incredibly strong, and his original pressing style is already excellent. More of a bodybuilding approach, which still has plenty of value. But adding a more technical powerlifting bench gives him another tool. Better shoulder control, more stability under heavy loads, and more carryover to overall upper body strength.

Strongmen compete with vertical pressing variations, but I’ll always include horizontal strength development to ensure the shoulders a strong though all angles - push AND pull.

Same goes for powerlifters. The competition lift requires horizontal pushing strength but I’ll allows include vertical pressing as supplementary movement to compliment their overall shoulder strength.

Strong shoulders need to be strong through every angle.

Watch this video as we break down the key technical changes that can help you press more weight with powerlifting techniques

A dynamic start can absolutely make your deadlift stronger.

But not in the absence of precision.

Before you try to build momentum, master your position. If you throw yourself into the bar hoping speed will create strength, but every rep starts from a different position, you’re teaching inconsistency.

In this example from the seminar, we had a student perform a set of 3 reps on deadlifts, and every repetition looked different because he was prioritising momentum over precision.

So I broke the deadlift into 3 stages:

1. Sit into position. Bend the knees until the hips land in the exact position you want. Then stop.
2. Create tension. Reach the crown of the head to the ceiling, engage the lats, and take the slack out of the bar. Then stop.
3. Push the world away.

If you choose to use a dynamic start, master the precise setup first, and then layer speed and momentum on top.

5 minute masterclass on program design strategies to break though your plateau! YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS!

Most people don’t plateau because they lack effort. They plateau because they push too hard too early and assume that maximum effort every week equals faster results. In life that usually works. In strength training it eventually stops progress.

Training is like running a marathon. It’s common sense not to sprint from the start of the race, because pacing yourself is what sets you up for success across the whole distance. We need to apply that same logic to our training across a mesocycle.

Here’s how I structure intensity over four weeks:

Week one: RPE 7
Week two: RPE 8
Week three: RPE 9
Week four: RPE 10

You’re not avoiding hard work. You’re building toward it. You’re creating room for progress instead of hitting your limit immediately and stalling.

Start conservative to allow room for guaranteed progression.

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 Winson Lam // Strength & Calisthenics Coach

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.

I was taught that the faster you descend in a squat, the more force you can rebound with out of the bottom.

Fast down equals fast up.

And this is true, if you’re a basketball full of air.

But take the air out of that basketball, and it doesn’t matter how fast you throw it down. It won’t bounce back up.

Humans respond in a similar way.

The air in the basketball is an analogy for tension. For us, creating tension isn’t just about filling our body with air and bracing, although that’s definitely a component of it.

We also need to maintain tension through the upper back, hips and core, while controlling the weight and maintaining our position throughout the descent.

Once you can maintain that tension, you can start using speed to your advantage.

For most people, I like to teach a controlled start to the descent, then gradually accelerate into and out of the hole, never sacrificing tension for speed.

So yes, fast down can equal fast up.

But learn how to maintain tension first. Then add speed.