Deadlifts and your Lats: The Connection

I recently saw a social media post from a popular online strength coach who I sometimes interact with, questioning the longstanding conventional wisdom about using your lats in the deadlift. He says that you should specifically DE-activate your lats when you deadlift. Surprising.

As anyone who’s been around lifting, especially powerlifters, knows: yelling “LATS!!” is a very popular cue that coaches and groups of lifters use for each other when deadlifting. But is it useful? Not really, but not for the reasons being questioned here. So let’s dive in and discuss what the lats are supposed to do during the deadlift, how to cue this, and then come back to this post.

What do the Lats do in the Deadlift?

When we think of lat exercises, we think of chin-ups, pull-ups, lat pulldowns, and various types of rows. Maybe if you’re more bodybuilding oriented you also think of straight arm pulldowns and pullovers. The deadlift obviously involves none of these movements, so where do the lats come in? How do they get worked in the deadlift, and what’s their role?

The lats’ role in the deadlift is to keep the bar on your legs so it starts and stays over mid-foot, rather than swinging out away from you. This is an isometric function, working hard but producing no movement - rather, preventing the movement of the bar away from your legs. You do this roughly the same way you’d hold the bottom of a straight arm cable lat pulldown. This shouldn’t be confused with scapular retraction, which we DONT want any of on the deadlift. Scapular retraction is pointless here, as any amount of weight beyond the trivial will pull your shoulder girdle into protraction anyway. So, don’t squeeze your shoulder blades together in the first place, waste of time. But DO use your lats, to keep the bar on your legs the whole way up, so the bar stays over mid-foot and you’re in balance for the lift.

How to Get the Lats to do Their Thing

Instead, squeeze chest up so your erectors are actively contracting and this action pulls the slack of out of the bar, but don’t retract shoulder blades. Here’s a video I made on squeezing chest up in the deadlift, to clarify all this. The screenshots above were pulled from this video, obviously.

While maintaining this squeezed up position, push the floor away while keeping the bar on your legs. “Keep the bar on your legs” is your main cue here, not “LATS!!!”

“Keep the bar on your legs,” works better than cueing “lats” about 97% of the time, because it gives you an identifiable action to focus on, rather than trying to think about the isometric function of one of the dozens of muscles involved in the deadlift all working at the same time, the individual and various actions of, most can’t feel while doing anyway. Hell, most people don’t even know what the lats are in the first place. Even the more experienced lifters who do, often only know them as “the thing that gets worked in rows and pulldowns.” They rarely know that the lats are the major shoulder extensors, acting as antagonists to the delts in this capacity, which are the major shoulder flexors. And even if they know the lats extend the shoulder, they rarely conceptualize how this fits into the holistic movement of the deadlift - it’s easier to think of a straight arm lat pulldown: concentric shoulder extension in the frontal plane, to work the lats, than a deadlift wherein the barbell isn’t manipulated by the upper body at all. All major classic lat exercises involve the upper body moving a load - how would the deadlift, wherein the limbs of upper body don’t move at all, work the lats? I explained how above, but most people don’t know this, and even if they did, it’s not something they can immediately conceptualize while trying to lift 500 lbs off the ground. It’s more like trying to remember the word of a foreign language that learned as an adult, and that you’re only haltingly conversational in. You can do it if given enough time to think, but it’s not going to lead to an instant ‘lightbulb moment’ that you can immediately react to, while simultaneously trying to lift a heavy weight off the ground.

Sidebar: Cues

Unlike initial instruction or between sets clarifications, cues given during the lift must be reacted to. Initial instruction can be longer and more detailed, but during the middle of a set, to get an instant reaction - an instant improvement in form - while the person is in the middle of lifting a heavy weight, a cue has to be a quick reminder of something he already knows.

Thus, a cue needs to be short (3-4 words or less), and simple, instantly reminding the lifter of something he already knows very clearly, so he can react to it. It can’t need to be processed or mulled over. With weight on your back or in your hands, too late, the moment for the cue to be useful already passed while you were mulling it over, and it took focus away from driving the weight hard at the same time. Bad all around.

So, “LATS!” fulfills the first part of this criteria - it’s short. But not the second. For the vast overwhelming majority of people, it’s not a quick reminder of something they already know. It can’t be reacted to, it has to be processed and even then, might not be clear. So we don’t use lats. “Keep the bar on your legs,” at the start, and then once that’s introduced in the initial instruction, it can be shortened during later sets to “bar on legs,” to make it short enough to be reacted to.

If “keep the bar on your legs,” doesn’t work, then other action oriented cues like, “squeeze an orange into your armpits,” can be helpful. This cues the more specific action of what you do when you hold the bottom of a straight arm lat pulldown, to keep the barbell on your legs and not let it come off.

As a general rule, compound barbell lifts are better cued with action oriented cues like “(keep the) bar on (your) legs,” or “push your knees out.” Whereas accessory movements are often cued better by thinking about the specific muscle or muscle group you want to focus on.

Deactivate your Lats?

Now that we’ve gone in depth on what the lats are supposed to do during the deadlift and how to successfully get them to do that, what was the deal with the anti-lat social media post?

Well, I looked into it and he is actually right, but just got some Anatomy 101 wrong. There is a 3 minute video there, in which the coach is clearly talking about scapular retraction, saying not to do that. At the top of this article, I addressed scap retraction as something you DO NOT want to do when setting up for your deadlift. So I totally agree with him here. The only issue is that he confused scapular retraction, which is an action of the shoulder girdle, for isometric shoulder extension, which is an action of the shoulder joint (Glenohumeral). Scapular retraction is mainly a function of the mid and lower traps and the rhomboids, not the lats. Whereas keeping the bar on your legs and not letting it swing out away from you while you deadlift IS primarily a function of the lats. So he’s right that we don’t want to do scapular retraction in the deadlift, but this has nothing to do with the lats, which we DO need to be active and working in the deadlift.

And thus the mystery is solved. I do agree with the coach here about what he was trying to say about not retracting the scapulae, but I highly recommend getting your basic anatomy right when posting about these things, so as not to confuse people.