Conventional stance, the lift this program trains from day one — with the grip choice that actually matters.
The deadlift starts with the bar on the floor and ends with you standing fully upright, hips and knees locked. It is the simplest-looking lift and the one most often taught with an oversimplified rule ("keep your back straight") that does not explain what is actually happening. This program teaches conventional stance as the default — feet roughly hip-width, hands outside the knees — over sumo's much wider stance. Sumo is a genuinely legitimate alternative some lifters pull more in, particularly those with a shorter torso relative to their legs, but conventional is where everyone starts.
Setting your hips that way asks your hips and hamstrings to fold forward without your lower back rounding to close the gap. If your setup is already right and that fold still isn't there, see mobility work for the deadlift setup for what actually limits it and the real drills for it.
Grip is its own decision. A double-overhand grip is safest for your arms but limits how much weight your hands can hold before the bar rolls out of them. A mixed grip (one palm forward, one back) solves that but comes with a real, documented cost: the underhand arm's bicep tendon takes on load the overhand arm's never does, and it is the specific, repeatedly documented site of bicep tears in heavy deadlifting. A hook grip — both hands overhand, thumb trapped under the fingers — avoids that asymmetry entirely and is what most of the heaviest raw pulls are set with; it is genuinely uncomfortable to learn, and that discomfort is the only real argument against it.
The breath-and-brace step above is the Valsalva maneuver — see the bracing and Valsalva maneuver page for what it actually does to stabilize your spine, and a real safety caveat worth knowing if you have high blood pressure or a heart condition.
The bar should feel like it is being pulled straight up off the floor while you also actively push the floor away — both cues describe the same effort. Your hips and knees extend together; if your quads are not strong enough to drive that first push, your hips will rise while the bar barely moves. Keep the bar close enough to brush your legs the whole way up. Finish standing fully upright with your hips and knees locked, driven there by squeezing your glutes, not by leaning your torso backward past vertical.
Fault: The upper back rounds as the bar leaves the floor, often from the bar starting too far from the shins.
Fix: The spine holds its natural curve through the pull; the dashed line marks the bar staying over midfoot.
Usually traced to the bar starting too far from your shins, or your hips set too low or too high at setup — not simply "not being careful enough." Fix the setup rather than testing how much rounding you can get away with; how dangerous this actually is under real training loads is an area researchers still disagree on.
Cue: “bar close, hips set”
Fault: The hips rise first and the torso angle collapses toward horizontal — a stiff-legged pull that shifts work onto the back.
Fix: Hips and shoulders rise together, torso angle held, bar staying tight to the legs the whole way up.
A sign your legs are not yet strong enough to drive the first part of the pull. Reset your hip height at setup and build general quad strength.
Cue: “push the floor away”
Two more worth knowing: the bar drifting away from your body is usually a loss of upper-back tightness during the pull — think of actively pulling your shoulder blades down. "Hitching", using your thighs to help drag the bar up past your knees, is a sign the weight has outrun your current pulling strength off the floor — and it is a disqualifying fault in competition.
Warm up with rep counts similar to what you are about to work with, rather than warming a heavy single up with a set of ten — full setup and bracing on every warm-up rep, not just the working sets.
A successful deadlift session on novice adds the largest jump of the four lifts, reflecting how much total muscle mass the hip-hinge pattern involves. Like the squat, deadlift trains every session in novice, not once a week.
Deadlift by phase: novice adds 10 lb (5 kg) most sessions; intermediate adds 5 lb (2.5 kg) on Test Day; advanced trains it as a percentage of a training max in five-week blocks. Miss reps two sessions running and it resets to 90% of its last completed weight.