Hold a broomstick along the spine so that it touches three places: the back of the head, between the shoulder blades and the tailbone.Push the hips straight back as if closing a car door with them. Knees soft, shins near vertical. The stick must keep all three contacts the whole way down.If the stick leaves the tailbone, the lower back has rounded. If it leaves the head, the neck is craning to look in a mirror. Stop there. That depth is the hinge you own today.Bram Keller sent this on a Thursday with two words, 'before Friday', which is the longest message he has ever written me. A generic coaching clip, forty-odd seconds, nobody I could name. It is for my set-up on the 🏋️ Deadlift: I had been squatting the bar up, hips too low and the back doing the first ten centimetres, which is how the tweak in 2023 happened, and he had watched me drift towards it again in the first week of block one. Tried it in the hall with the actual broom. On the first five attempts the stick left my tailbone at about knee height; Jonas walked past, asked nothing and moved the umbrella stand; by the tenth I could feel the hamstrings take up the load before the bar would have left the floor. On the Friday Bram watched one warm-up set and said 'boring works', which I have decided is praise. Still ten broomstick hinges before the first deadlift set, every session. It costs forty seconds and nobody at the gym has ever commented, which at Foundry is also praise.
