Mark Ottobre shows two Romanian deadlift variations: a glute-focused version with a deep hip hinge and knee bend, and a traditional weightlifting version with a wide snatch grip and pure hinge. He uses a stick along the spine to check alignment and emphasizes spreading the feet and removing shoes for better positioning.
There are 2 ways to do an RDL, and I bet you didn't know how to do the second. The first way is the popular physique way, which we're targeting our glutes. Now, when we do it, you want to bend and hinge as much as you can. Then once you get that tightness, we bend our knees and we're hitting more glutes. Now, people ask, when should I start to bend my knees? Here's a simple tool that you can use. Grab a stick just like this. Put one hand at your head, one hand at the base, and keep the stick in line with your spine. Now, when you hinge, the way you want to think about it, it's not just back. And it's not just up, it's back and up. So you want to think about spreading your butt crack to the top of the roof. So what that looks like in real time is we initiate, we pull, we pull, we pull, we spread the cheeks as much as we can. Once we get to the point where we can't go any lower, that's when we need to bend our knees. For some folks, they're only going to get to there. That's fine. If you only get to there, that's when you're going to need to start to bend your knees to really hit your glutes. And the other thing you want to do is you want to spread your feet as hard as you can. That's going to help lock in your spine. Now the second way to do it is more traditional weightlifting to do it. So you go Go wider with your hands, a snatch grip. The way you find the snatch grip is if I put my hands here and I bend, you can see the stick moving. If I put it here in the snatch position, if I bend, you don't see the stick moving. That's your snatch grip. As you do it, it's all about the hinge. There is no bend in the knees. Traditionally more of a weightlifting movement, but that's going to really isolate and hit our hamstrings. If you've enjoyed this video, follow my page for more. And also get rid of your shoes when you're doing this.
