Alan Thrall recommended this community for me to get help with my wife’s deadlift form. We have tried many different things. I have researched through a lot of forums, watched many YouTube videos, including Alan’s, and send videos of her to some experienced lifters. Unfortunately, nothing has panned out yet.
She sets up right and concentric movement looks good enough to me. It’s the eccentric negative that I think is wrong. Maybe her arms are too short to bring the bar below her knees before she has to bend her knees. Whatever it is, her knees bend before the bar clears them and it forces the bar out in front of her. The bar ends up over her toes instead of midfoot.
I attached a video of one of our sessions. Right now we are just focused on why her knees are bending too soon. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Here’s my two pennies- If that’s a working set, it doesn’t look like it at all, maybe bump it up a hair… That being said, she needs to force herself to not bend the knees until the bar clears them. She needs to be hyper aware of what her knees are doing in order to actively correct this. She looks like it’s just a routine thing and there’s no thought as to what she’s doing.
Long story short the bar path is not straight, the bar has to travel around the bent knees on the descent. Try leaning over more before bending the knees. Move her eyes slightly more down. But the biggest sinner, those weight discs doesn’t look like standard diameter. it makes it impossible to reset and brace between each rep. And as Dr Feigenbaum would have said: that is very light, increase the weight on the bar.
More weight on the bar also makes it easier to fix little mistakes on the form in my experience.
Now as i look at it the second time it would almost seem she pushes the bar against her thighs on the descent. With heavier weight that would not been possible, again heavy(er) weight is your friend, and standard diameter discs. With that said, it is not off by much, just some small corrections and the form is good.
Agreed, it seems like the small plates really exaggerate the issue. Does your gym have bumper plates? Maybe throw a couple of 25’s on there? If not, can she do block/rack pulls? Maybe that would help. Also, she could reset between reps, the set doesn’t necessarily need to be touch and go…
The main thing is to cue her to not bend her knees so early. Maybe try “Straight legs!”
That being said, a couple things going on here:
She’s not pulling from the correct height. Already been touched on above, but bumpers or blocks to put the weights on will help a lot with lowering the weight and form in general, though it looks pretty good, no major issues.
This looks awfully light for her, and I don’t think she could bend her knees so early with heavier weight and lower the weight in a sustainable way. Having not seen her lift heavy, I can’t say for sure.
It appears that in doing touch-and-go reps, she’s anticipating the bottom of the rep instead of just setting the bar down. If you get the plates at the right height and have her set the bar down completely, then reset/get right before each pull, that would probably be better. That being said, I don’t know what her specific goals are, so it depends.
