How to Prep your Back for Deadlifts

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This week I want to show you how I like to prep the low back and core for deadlifting.

When getting the low back ready for deadlifting, it's important to first make sure you move it through a full range of motion in a cat/cow. The reason for this is you don't want to load and create strong muscular contractions in your back without having moved it through a full range of motion unloaded. Think of it as prepping the joint and muscles around the area, showing your brain where those positions are, and then bracing and holding neutral.

After going through the cat/cow, I want to get my breathing and bracing prepped using the drills in the video.

Next I want some strong muscular contractions around my whole abdominal wall while I am moving my hips using the dead bug against the wall.

Then we have to go standing. We will do the first standing lift as a banded good morning to prime the hip hinge movement.

Finally, we get the barbell. 3-5 reps of either an RDL or conventional deadlift is good here.

After round 1 I would likely skip the breathing/bracing drills in isolation and use them instead in the other drills. Each round the deadlift weight gets heavier until I am at a working weight. I would then begin my training sets.

The sequence is as follows and performed for 5-10 minutes:

• Cat/cow 10 reps
• Breathing/bracing priming (round 1 only)
• Deadbug against wall (5-10 reps)
• Banded good morning (10 reps)
• Barbell deadlift (3-5 reps, heavier each round)

Once that's all done (the 5-10 mins) I would get into the working sets for the day.

Thanks for reading,

Ryan