The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training.

You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole trip.

There are a few subtle complications. The bar should move up and down the legs and a vertical line over the

middle of the foot. The bar should start from a position directly over the middle of the foot,

and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that's really about all there is to it.

The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.

Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage.

And bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for.

With a bar in your hands and your feet against the floor,

your whole body is completely involved in the exercise,

which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent

a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.

The term kinetic chain refers to the musculoskeletal components, the links, as it were,

of an exercise between the load, which is in this case the barbell, and the base of the support.

In this case, your feet against the floor.

The kinetic chain in the deadlift is essentially the entire body,

and everything between hands and floor is doing its anatomically determined proportion

of the work of moving the bar. This means that your

legs, hips, back, lats, arms, and grip contribute the fraction of the lifting that their individual

positions on the skeleton and their relationships to each other permit.

Here's the best part about barbill training.

If you use good technique, your anatomy sorts out each muscle group's contribution so that you don't have to.

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