Deadlift mechanics. The obvious can be obscure.

For those of you listening, I'd like to warn you this is a dry technical article.

It will help to have some caffeine on board.

The human skeleton is the system of levers that we use to interact with our physical environment.

It is operated by a system of motors, the little tension engines called muscles

that operate the levers of the skeleton by generating a contractile force.

The details of the operation of this physical system can therefore be understood through analysis,

and these details can be as complex or as general as the level of the analysis.

With more than 600 muscles and 200 bones, things can get very weird, or they can be rendered understandable by pulling back a little and viewing the system as a chain of segments that transmit the force generated by the groups of muscles that operate them.

Running, jumping, throwing, swimming, hitting a ball are fantastically complex activities

if all of the constituent muscles and bones are enumerated,

each of their contributions to the functioning kinetic chain considered,

and their individual force

production transmission roles calculated.

It's not only impossible with our current instrumentation, it's rather pointless because

enumerating the individual contributions of the forearm muscles and bones of the wrist to a racquetball serve does not help us serve the ball or learn how to do it better.

Movements become analyzable if you consider them at the macro level.

The functional segments of the body operating against the resistance of the implement

or the ground and the primary muscles responsible for their operation.

The concept of rigid body analysis, where the shape and dimensions of a body are considered

to be constant and undeformable, regardless of the forces

applied to it, is useful in the analysis of complex human movement. A stride in a sprint,

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