Coach Mark Ottobre breaks down the deadlift mistake he sees constantly: lifters flex their lumbar spine when they should keep it stiff, and position their head and shoulders too far forward over the bar. This creates an S-shaped pull that fights your center of mass instead of staying efficient and safe.
If you think of his body like a fishing hook, we want the lumbar to be stiff, but we want the thoracic to be bent. What we're seeing here is his lumbar is actually quite bent, right? So he's not anchored into the right position. So this is really a deadlift in the truest sense, is his weight is over the bar and he's really using a lot of lower back to get this up. If we look at a deadlift in its truest sense, is we're trying to pull the bar into our center of mass. So we're pulling on a diagonal axis this way, which most people get it twisted. They think you're pulling on a diagonal straight up. You're not pulling on a diagonal straight up. The other thing, and someone mentioned it, his head is well over the bar, as long as— as well as his shoulders, more importantly. His head being over the bar, so if you look at the way he lifts, it creates this kind of like— he's going to pull, it's going to create like an S-curve. So he's going to have to recalibrate as he lifts because the load is out in front of him and not in his center of mass.
