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the shins get more vertical and move back relative to the front of the feet, allowing the bar to travel in a vertical path up the legs. If the knee angle changes first, the bar can move up in a straight line, the way heavy bars like to move. If you feel the weight go to your toes, or if your coach sees your heels come up, you know what you’re doing wrong. Get your weight back off your toes, keep your chest up, and pull the weight straight up your shins as you push the floor. This forces the bar back into the correct path, which lets your knees straighten out and lets your quadriceps extension start the deadlift correctly. It might also be helpful to think about pushing the bar back into your legs with your lats, reinforcing the close-to-the-shin position a second way (Figure 4-34).

Figure 4-34. The order in which the angles open up off the floor is important for correct technique. (A) Reference angles in the start position. (B) When the hip angle opens first, the bar must travel forward to clear the knees, and usually the shins get scraped when this happens. (C) The correct order – knees first, then hips – allows for a vertical bar path.

When the weight gets heavy, it is a common error to let the bar come forward, away from your shins, before it even leaves the floor. When this happens, your hips will have lifted, also before the load moves. Using our pulling model, we can see that when this occurs, the knee angle has opened, the hip angle has probably stayed constant, and the back angle has become more horizontal, all before the load has moved (Figure 4-35). In this situation, your quadriceps have extended your knees, but have not moved any weight while doing so. In opening the knee angle unloaded – pushing your butt up in the air without moving the bar – the quads have avoided participating in the lift and have placed the entire job on your hip extensors, which now have even more to do since they must move through a greater angle to extend. In addition, since your back is now almost parallel to the floor, your back muscles are in a position of decreased mechanical advantage: they have to stay in isometric contraction longer while rotating through a greater angle, starting in the worst mechanical position they can occupy – parallel to the floor.

Figure 4-35. (A) Start position. (B) When the knee angle opens before the bar leaves the floor, the quadriceps have not been used to move the load. When the hamstrings fail to control the knee angle (their distal function) the back angle goes horizontal. (C) This leaves the bar away from the shins, and the work of lifting the weight becomes predominantly hip extension. Technique errors that involve one group of muscles failing to make their contribution to an exercise are a common phenomenon in barbell training.

The reason for this is not immediately apparent. In the deadlift, the clean, and all other pulling exercises from the floor, raising the hips before the chest is a common enough problem that we should analyze it here. The quadriceps straighten the knees, and if the back angle stays constant while this happens, the bar comes vertically up the shins. But it is the hip extensors – the glutes and hamstrings and, to some extent, the adductors – that act as stabilizers during the initial phase of the pull and maintain the back angle by exerting tension on the pelvis from the posterior, at their insertion points on the ischium and the ilium. If the spinal erectors keep the back flat, the hip extensors anchor the back angle by pulling down on the bottom of the pelvis. The pelvis and the spine are locked in line by the erectors, so the hamstrings actually keep the chest up and the back angle constant, allowing the quads’ function of straightening the knees to push the bar away from the ground. During this phase, the hip angle will open slightly, but the back angle should stay constant relative to the floor. It is as the bar approaches the knees that the hip extensors begin to actually change the back angle by actively opening the hip angle. So, the function of