Top Cues for Your Back Pain and Deadlifting
Back pain is one of the most common injuries in the US, affecting 80% of people in their lifetime and 26% of people in the US at any given time.
As performance physical therapists, we treat an awful lot of back pain at our clinic.
As a result, we prescribe and dose out deadlifts frequently. Deadlifts are and will forever be one of my favorite movements for not only back pain but the self advocacy and empowerment that comes with it.
For today’s purposes we’re not going to dive into the “are deadlifts good for your back” discussion, here's a sneak peak into that one, THEY ARE, end of argument. Today we’re diving into the top cues and recommendations we make for deadlifts in our clinic.
I love talking cues for lifting. It’s language, it's powerful, and can make the world of difference in someone's pain journey. We could instruct someone one way and get one result, change the cue by one word, and get a completely different effect. At our clinic, when we talk about individual prescriptions, this is part of that conversation. Each individual has their learning style and the way they process information. It’s up to us as performance physical therapists to find what works for them.
Within that, we still find common themes amongst our cueing that work for a lot of people. Here are our top cues we prescribe to help our patients with their deadlift:
1) Make your Deadlift a Deadlift and your Squat a Squat
This one probably is not what you expected right off the bat. However, one of the most common tweaks we make to someone’s deadlift form or if they are first learning the movement, is they tend to be overly squatty. By going into your lift with the intention of doing a deadlift, with deadlift form, you will start sending signals to your brain that this is the framework and mindset I need to be in. By doing so, you will naturally start incorporating the other cues automatically.
2) Barbell Starts Over your Shoe Laces
One of the most common mistakes we have to fix and teach our patient’s deadlift is the barbell starts too far away from them. By pulling the barbell in and starting with the barbell over our shoe laces, it becomes easier to create tension at the start of our lift. The end outcome is a better bar bath, more efficiency in our lift, and ultimately, getting stronger.
3) Hips Back, Shoulders Over the Barbell
Especially in the presence of back pain, it can be quite scary and nerve racking to get this far over the barbell. The reason being, in order to do so, we have to get our hips back, thus placing our back in a psychologically threatening position. As with our barbell over shoe laces cue, this enables us to create better tension, capacity to better utilize our hips in the deadlift, and counter-intuitively protective position for our back. If we don’t get our shoulders far enough over the barbell, we stay very squatty, and biomechanically our backs have work a significant amount more.
4) Push Through the Floor
Deadlifts most commonly pop up on either back day or maybe pull day. Deadlifts work our posterior musculature. This makes sense. However, on a cueing perspective, it can cause our hips to shoot up too early and again put us in a precarious biomechanical position. By pushing through the floor, we are initiating through our glutes and butt muscles, creating better timing with the barbell and efficiency within the lift.
5) Stand Up
This one seems a little silly but is one of my favorite cues for our patients. There can be a lot of overthinking when it comes to lifting. This is one easy and gets the perfect outcome almost every time. To me the secret to the deadlift is in the set up. If we set everything up right, everything falls into place, and we just need to stand up.
While deadlifts are not the end all be all when it comes to treatment of back pain, they certainly are a staple in our programming and come up quite a bit.
Check out one of our patients and how we helped him with his deadlift to see how we do this in the clinic!
If you are currently experiencing back pain and looking for guidance with your situation, please reach out to consult with us at Tundra Performance and Physical Therapy where we are experienced at creating customized and individualized rehabilitation programs fit to you and your goals.
Helping athletes RESOLVE THEIR PAIN by CLEARLY DEFINING THE PROBLEM and IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS to get them back doing the activities they love!
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