People often say the thing that connects you to the bar during a deadlift isn’t your grip but your lats. If you can activate them during setup and the lift, your technique and performance can improve in meaningful ways. The challenge is that for some lifters, instructions like “activate your lats” can feel as unfamiliar as Klingon or long division.
What are the lats, and how do you turn them on?
Squeeze the orange—external cuing for the win. This is one of my favorite cues because it helps clean up deadlift technique in several ways: it promotes more full-body tension; it encourages a bit more posterior tilt of the shoulder blades for a small biomechanical advantage; and it helps engage the lats more, aiding upper-back tension and reducing rounding. It won’t magically prevent every awkward moment at the end of a lift, but it helps.
Latissimus dorsi: This large muscle spans from the spine to the upper arm. It attaches to the humerus (the upper arm bone) and to the spinous processes of the mid-to-lower back, and it’s the muscle most people target with lat pulldowns.
