Of all the exercises I coach, the Romanian deadlift (RDL) might be the trickiest to grasp.
The intended muscle group being worked is hamstrings.
But keeping tension out of your lower back and soley in the hamstrings is really difficult.
It requires good knowledge of where each moving part should be throughout the exercise.
There’s several cue’s I use to get clients performing this as efficiently as possible.
1 - Practice without weight first
To work any muscle you must first stretch it, then shorten it. The easiest was to do that with your hamstrings is simply bending over and touching your toes.
And if you do this enough times you should start to feel those hamstrings firing up.
However, if you were to do this movement whilst holding weight in your hands, touching your toes with rounded back would cause a lot of stress on the lower back.
So instead, without any weight, practice touching your toes with a neutral spine (straight back).
Based on your current level of hamstring flexibility, you may be limited on far down you can go down.
Some people might be able to get really low (mid to low shin), for others it might be just above the knee. But at this point, either is ok.
The most important thing is your stretching the hamstring as much as possible (with a neutral spine), then shortening it by standing back up.
Practice just bodyweight. Incorporating weigh once you feel comfortable with it (feel free to send me videos for analysis).
2 - Push you hips back
Instead of feeling like your leaning forwards, imagine your body is folding at the hips.
A great way to encourage that is pushing your hips as far back behind your heels as you can on the way down.
3 - Keep you head up
The biggest mistakes newcomers to this exercise make is looking down as they hinge.
Make sure your head stays up, keeping your gaze forwards at all times.
This will ensure your upper back stays rigid, keeping the spine in a neutral position throughout.
4 - Don’t lean back
The second biggest mistake is leaning back at the top.
Be sure to finish in an upright position and avoid pushing the hips too far forwards, putting strain on the lower back.
5 - Keep the bar close
When practicing the RDL without any weight, keep your palms flat against your thighs and slide them down your leg as you go down.
This is a great habit to get into, because when you perform this with a bar, you want it to be scrapping up and down your legs.
The further away that bar goes from you legs, the more the lower back will start to pull.
6 - Sit back in the heels
Its imperative you keep your weight in the heels at all time.
Pushing your hips back and keeping the bar close to your legs will help with this, but there will have to be some conscious effort on your part to dig those heels in as you perform your RDL’s.
7 - Squeeze your glutes at the top
As you stand up straight and shorten the hamstrings, a great way of driving as much tension into the hamstrings, is by squeezing your glutes.
It's hard to tense your glutes without inadvertently tensing your hamstrings, therefore this is a great habit to start with.
Overtime you may be able to shift the focus into isolating tension only your hamstrings.
8 - Posterior pelvic tilt (advanced)
This is something you want to incorporate once you’ve mastered all the above.
The pelvis tilts forwards and backwards, and we can use this to maximise the shortened position of the hamstrings.
As you get into an upright position, performing whats called a posterior pelvic tilt gives an additional squeeze to the hamstrings and glutes.
The reason this is more of an advanced move is because people often lean back instead of tilting their pelvis.
As you can see in the image above, the man is still stood upright, he’s just tilted his pelvis into a backwards position.
The pelvis must then return to a forwards facing position (anterior pelvic tilt) before the next rep begins.
These are the foundational cues to build a really strong RDL
Hopes this helps - Any follow up questions, drop a comment below.
Ryan
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