Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [165]
Figure 7-25. The Romanian deadlift.
The emphasis on driving everything back is very important; the use of the hips instead of the knees is what engages the hip extensors and excludes the quads. It helps to think about the weight shifting back to the heels, the knees moving back, the bar being shoved back to stay in contact with the legs, and the butt moving back; in fact, everything moves back except the shoulders, which slide forward, out over the bar. The shins must come to vertical before the bar reaches the knees, and the knees must never move forward at all after the initial unlocking. Any forward knee movement puts the quads in a position to contribute to the movement by extending the knees on the way back up, canceling out the desired hip-extension effect.
Figure 7-26. The progression from top to bottom in the RDL. Note that the hip-angle change is predominantly responsible for the ROM of the exercise.
The most common error will be the knees-forward problem. You will be tempted to relax the tension on your knees at the bottom; the hamstring tension builds all the way down and is not relieved until the muscles are shortened, either by having done the work of extending the hips at the top or by your relaxing your knees forward at the bottom. If you shorten the hamstrings by allowing the knees to drop forward – thus flexing the knees and causing the two ends of the hamstrings to come together, taking the tension off from the bottom – then the quads will do the work that the hamstrings should have done when they extend the knees during the recovery to the top.
Remember from the discussion of pulling mechanics in the Deadlift chapter that the shoulders stay in front of the bar. This means that the arms are inclined back from the shoulders at a slight angle, with the lats pulling back on the humerus to keep the bar over the mid-foot. The lower the bar goes down your legs without your knees bending, the more angle your arms must assume to keep the bar over the mid-foot, and the more work the lats must do to maintain this position. At a very low position on the shins, this angle becomes quite extreme, contributing to the difficulty involved in doing a strict RDL very far below the knees. In fact, if you touch the floor at the bottom of an RDL, you are probably doing it with a fairly light weight.
Also common is the failure to hold the back rigid in absolute extension. One of the main benefits of the RDL is the isometric work it provides for the erectors, as they hold the spine rigid while the hamstrings extend the hips. This back position is rather hard to hold, and the lifter needs a lot of concentration to keep the chest up and the low back arched with no looseness, while sliding the hips back, the knees back, the bar back, the heels down, and the shoulders forward. For a slow exercise, the RDL is technically difficult because it is very easy to do wrong. If the back rounds or the knees come forward, less work is being done by the targeted muscle groups and the movement feels easier. But done correctly, with the back locked into rigid extension and no knee extension involved, the RDL is perhaps the best assistance exercise for deadlifts and cleans because it works the very things that cause heavy deadlifts to be missed.
The best cues for good form on the RDL are “chest up,” “arch the back,” and “knees back,” with an occasional reminder to keep the weight off the toes. The chest cue will remind you to keep the thoracic spine in extension, while arching the back usually gets interpreted by most people as a low-back cue. The knee cue keeps the quads out of the movement, but it can also cause the bar to fall away from the legs, and you might need to cue the lats by thinking “push the bar back.”
When you’re doing heavy RDLs, use a double-overhand