The hinge, and a checklist for the deadlift

Bend at the hips with a flat back while your knees stay mostly straight. That is a hinge, and it is different from a squat in one way that matters enormously: the load travels through your hips and hamstrings rather than your knees.

Get it right and it is the strongest position the human body has. Get it wrong and the load moves onto your lower back, which is how one ordinary lift becomes the injury everyone in the family remembers.

The pattern before the weight

Before touching a bar, find the movement.

Stand with your feet hip-width apart. Put the back of one hand on your lower back and the other on your stomach. Now push your hips backwards — not down, backwards, as if you were closing a car door with them — letting your torso tip forward and your knees bend only slightly.

The hand on your lower back should feel nothing change. The moment you feel your lower back start to round, you have reached the end of your hinge. That point is your current range, and for a lot of people it is considerably shorter than they assume.

Practise it against a wall: stand a foot away, hinge back until your hips touch the wall, return. Twenty of those, and the pattern starts to feel like a hip movement rather than a back movement.

The ten-point checklist

Work down this list before every heavy set. It takes fifteen seconds once it is habit.

1. Bar over mid-foot. Not against your shins, not out in front. Look down: the bar should roughly bisect your foot.
2. Feet about hip-width. Wider is a sumo deadlift, which is a different lift with different demands.
3. Grip just outside your legs. Your arms hang straight down — they are hooks, not levers, and they should never bend.
4. Take the slack out of the bar. Pull up gently until you hear or feel the plates settle against the collars. Starting from a slack bar is how backs round.
5. Chest up, lats engaged. Imagine squeezing an orange in each armpit. This is what stops your upper back rounding.
6. Flat back — not arched. Neutral, the spine's natural shape. Over-arching is its own problem.
7. Neck follows the spine. Eyes at a spot on the floor three or four metres ahead. Do not crane up to look in a mirror.
8. Push the floor away. Think of it as a leg press rather than a pull. The bar comes up because you drove your feet down.
9. Bar stays against you. It should brush your shins and thighs the whole way. Any gap between the bar and your body is leverage working against your back.
10. Finish standing tall, and stop. Squeeze your glutes. Do not lean back at the top — that adds nothing and compresses your spine.

Lowering it counts too

Most people are careful going up and then dump the bar. The descent is the same movement in reverse: push your hips back first, keep the bar against your legs, and control it to the floor.

If you cannot control the way down, the weight is too heavy — regardless of whether you got it up.

The variations, and who they suit

Trap bar deadlift. If your gym has one, and especially if you are returning after a long break, start here. The handles sit at your sides so the load line runs closer to your centre of mass, which is far more forgiving of an imperfect back position. It is not a lesser exercise. For most people over forty it is the better one.

Romanian deadlift. Starts from standing and never touches the floor. It emphasises the hamstrings and trains the range hard. Lighter weight, more control.

Hamstring curl. If deadlifts are off the table entirely — a genuine back history, a recent injury — the machine still trains the muscle even though it does not train the pattern. Better than skipping the day.

How heavy, honestly

The free program puts deadlifts at 3 sets of 6 to 8, which is the lowest rep range in the whole block. That is deliberate.

The deadlift is the lift where form fails first and where the cost of failure is highest. Start meaningfully lighter than you think you need to. Add weight when you can complete every set with two reps still in reserve and your tenth-point checklist still intact at the last rep.

A perfect set of eight at a modest weight is worth more to your future than a heavy single you were not ready for. Nobody is watching, and the bar does not care.