How to Stop Rounding Your Lower Back During Deadlifts

Stretches, Form Cues, and Veteran Advice to Save Your Lower Back and Improve Your Deadlift

I recently had a question from a Facebook friend named Jason. He’s struggling with a very common form problem during his deadlifts; a rounding lower back.

Preventing lower back rounding during deadlifts is crucial for proper form and injury reduction.

To answer his question, I put together a quick video for Exercise Tip Tuesday, but to really explain things properly, I’m writing this article. Watch the video first and if you want more detail, read this article.

Before I get into things, I just want to say thanks for reading and if you benefit from this article, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Flexibility Matters

Being able to move how you’re supposed to plays a huge role here. This is a bit obvious, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are tight and it’s causing poor exercise form. When we’re a newborn, our bodies move exactly how they’re supposed to. We’re so pliable and loose, but that changes in time.

As we grow and find ourselves stuck in the same positions for hours on end, muscles tighten. Without actively combating this tightening, we end up losing mobility.

The deadlift is a hip hinge movement, which primarily activates the glutes, hamstrings, and other muscles of the hips and posterior chain. If these muscles are tight, especially the glutes, hamstrings, or hips, it’s harder to keep the lower back straight, particularly in the starting position of each rep. This is also where a flexed lower back matters the most!

You can make it easier to keep your lower back straight during deadlifts by improving glute, hamstring, hip, and lower back flexibility. Instead of just telling you to increase your flexibility and letting you fend for yourself, I want to give you great examples of stretches for each area to get you there.

Glutes

This is a supremely excellent video for glute flexibility gains. There are three main stretches being outlined here and all of them are worth your time.

Hamstrings

The hamstrings are one of our tightest muscle groups in general. A main reason for this is because when we’re sitting at a desk or on the couch, our knees are usually bent. This places the hamstrings in a shortened position for extended periods of time, giving them little reason to stay flexible. We’re just not spending much time in a hamstring-stretched position during daily life. The following video provides a handful of hamstring stretches to help you move how you’re supposed to move.

Hips

Hip mobility is very important for easy hip hinge exercise execution and being able to keep your lower back flexed as you descend into the bottom position of a deadlift or squat. The more flexible you are in your hips, the better your reps will feel.

Lower Back

Complete your deadlift muscle flexibility package with added lower back mobility. Here’s another great video for you to review.

Before moving to the next topic, I just want to say that I highly recommend subscribing to Tom’s YouTube channel, The Bodyweight Warrior. His content on flexibility is outstanding and he should be your go-to for this type of information.

Learn About Proper Form

Simply put, for any exercise, you can’t have great form if you don’t know what great form is. Again, another obvious statement, but it’s just so true.

The perfect execution of an exercise is always accompanied by reviewing and repeating form cues in your head.

Brace here, flex there, focus on these muscles…these are all thoughts that should be going through your head while training. Your mind should be on the task at hand, nothing else.

Right now we’re talking about deadlifts, particularly the position of the lower back. When deadlifting, the lower back should remain in a fixed position, otherwise known as statically flexed. Think of static flexing as holding a muscle in a flexed position. When you do a plank, your abs are statically flexed. When you see someone wall sitting, they’re statically flexing their quads.

When deadlifting, the spinal erectors should be statically flexed to keep the lower spine in an arched/neutral position.

Here’s a mental cue to help you do this; think of the torso as the link between your working lower body muscle groups and the weight those muscles are lifting.

The torso isn’t actually doing the lifting, it’s simply the part of your body that holds the weight (the barbell).

You want that link to be solid and stiff, and statically flexing your spinal erectors is how you make that happen.

Here’s something else you should keep in mind for proper lower back position; if you just bend over forward to lower yourself into the bottom of a deadlift rep, your spine can’t stay statically flexed. It’s going to have to round over because you’re literally bending over. This is very bad.

The solution to this lies in how the eccentric phase of the deadlift starts.

Instead of simply bending over at the hips to lower the weight, you should be pushing your hips back.

This initiates the hip hinge movement and allows you to keep your spinal erectors statically flexed. Your torso will fold over and the bar will move toward the floor, but your lower back will not round.

Before moving on, I have one more key mental cue for great deadlifts with a braced lower back.

When doing the lift in front of a mirror, try to see your hips and shoulders moving up and down at the same pace.

In other words, don’t straighten your knees and lift your hips first, followed by lifting your torso second. If you do this, you’re changing the dynamics of the lift and performing more of a straighter leg deadlift. That’s not what we’re after here.

Not only does this form cue help with more leg muscle activation, it also helps with improved posture during the lift.

By moving the hips and shoulders together, you’ll naturally keep your chest up, shoulder blades taut, and spinal erectors flexed as you lift with your legs.

I will admit, it’s challenging to convey form cues and movements through writing. It’s much easier to do through one-on-one coaching or video. Since coaching isn’t going to happen at the moment, I’m going to finish this section up with some videos illustrating great deadlift form and I want you to notice how all of them include the three mental cues I went over.

• Statically flex the spinal erectors. The torso is the link between the weight and the working lower body muscle groups.

• Start the eccentric phase of each rep by pushing the hips back.

• During reps, the hips and shoulders should rise and fall at the same pace.

Ego Lifting

My final piece of advice, in order to maintain a strong lower back, is to check your ego at the door. Fact: lifting too heavy during any exercise will break your form.

With deadlifts, the first step of form breakdown is almost always lower back rounding. If your lower back is constantly rounding and you just can’t fix it, you need to lower the weight.

As mentioned in one of the videos above, it’s OK if your form is breaking down at a certain weight, provided you accept it and dial it back. When training hard and pushing yourself, it’s normal to run into barriers to progression. It’s how you react to that barrier that determines whether or not you’ll be safe or sorry.

Taking a few steps back and working forward again, with proper form, is much better than the alternative.

Thanks for reading and if you benefitted from this article, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.