SQUAT, DEADLIFT & HIP THRUST FORM TIPS | Education Series Ep. 1

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:14]Okay, we're going into a little bit of a different video today. I'm putting my coaching hat back on and we're going through some four movements. I'm not going to go through them too in depth, but just a couple of pointers to help you out in your squat, your deadlift, and your hip thrust. Um, probably the main compound movements I do, every time I post on Instagram, I get somebody DMs like, "Oh, can you do like a form video or tips and tricks on, you know, how to get started and that sort of thing?" Cuz obviously form is super important, especially when you are trying to lift heavy and, you know, your back squat deadlift especially to avoid those injuries. Uh, and then also just to support your hybrid training journey if that's what you're doing as well. Doing getting strong over the compound lifts is only going to help just everything and your strength across board. So, let's get into our squat technique. So, before we even get onto the bar, you kind of have to figure out your squat stance. Everyone's a little bit different, especially as females, you know, our hips are a little bit wider.

[00:01:12]Some people may be able to squat deeper in a narrow squat, some people a little bit further. So, essentially with our squat, we want to be able to break parallel each and every rep to make sure we are hitting depth and getting the most out of the movement. So, if you want to play around, get a box that's roughly the height you maybe you'll take one off. Yeah, roughly the height that you want to squat to. Again, you can kind of play around. Go like a narrow stance. If that's too hard and you can't quite reach the box, go out a little bit more. Kind of just get a feel of where your hips open the widest. With your toes as well, try and point them out slightly just to allow your knees to track out over your toes. So, I've squatted a lot. I love squats. So, I've kind of figured out where my squat depth is that I can squat to without that tucking as well. So, you'll see if I do try and go that little bit lower, my pelvis tucks under. So, you want to find a depth that you don't go too low that that happens because when you do load up the bar and you do do that tuck, it's going to put a lot of weight on your lower back because that's when your glutes deactivate. So, you want to kind of find that sweet spot, take the bar away, figure that out, and then once you kind of get familiar with your depth, your stance, your knees tracking over your toes, you then can add the barbell in. So, with squats, I always start with doing a body weight warm up and then I'll do an empty barbell and then start loading up the weight from there, not just going straight into it because that's when injuries happen when you don't warm up properly. So, starting with the barbell, hand width first and foremost, you want to go as close as you can as long as your mobility allows it.

[00:02:58]So, if your shoulder mobility isn't great, you may need to go a little bit wider, but essentially want to make sure our upper body is as tight as possible.

[00:03:05]So, I can go pretty close with my grip and still get my elbows back and still stay nice and locked in. Again, play around with that a little bit.

[00:03:16]Once we are under the bar, try I see some people using the padding because they say it hurts their shoulders. Completely get it, but it's probably because the barbell is sitting in the wrong position. If it's sitting in the right spot, it shouldn't hurt that much because it's not sitting on the bony part of your shoulders. So, if you see when I come under the bar, when my elbows are down, there's no ridge for the barbell to sit on. As soon as my elbows come back, my traps activate and there's now that musly part for the bar to sit on and it should be nice and cushiony for that barbell. When it's down here, it's kind of sitting on my shoulders and that's when it kind starts to get uncomfortable. Just to make sure elbows are back, staying nice and tight.

[00:04:00]So, putting that all together, nice big grip on the bar, elbows are back. When I'm doing elbows back as well, I'm not just thinking push my elbows back. I'm thinking about squeezing my shoulder blades together. So, how I got taught is imagine there's like a pencil between your shoulder blades. You want to squeeze it together and try and make that pencil stick. So, holding that movement is what you want to hold throughout the entire movement cuz as soon as we get to the bottom of the squat, as soon as that tension releases, it's when we're going to fall forward, collapse, and our form just going to not look very pretty. So you want to keep that tension throughout that whole rep and it's really going to help you especially when you get under the heavier weight. So under the barbell squeezing those shoulder blades together with our feet really try and get into the habit of doing a twoft takeoff. I see some people you know unrackck the bar like this.

[00:04:56]It's not going to be an issue when you are doing lighter weight, but as soon as you start getting quite heavy, think about it. You're putting all that weight through one foot and you're not allowing yourself to brace properly before you're getting under the bar. So, really try and get into the habit. Two foot takeoff, upper body nice and tight.

[00:05:17]Switch that core on, brace, and then stand up. When you're here, all you should do is just one, two, step back again. when you're under a lot of weight, you don't want to be kind of walking around cuz you can't really brace properly. Um, and yeah, the less steps you can do under heavy weight, the better. All right, let's talk about the squat itself. We've covered the setup.

[00:05:40]Now, when I'm here, a lot of people just think, okay, I'm just going to go and squat. What you want to do with your feet, it takes a bit of practice, but when I'm in this position, I've got my squat stance. I want to get tight throughout my whole body. I want to switch my glutes on and that's just going to help my knees stay out and just stay activated throughout the whole rep.

[00:06:04]So, what you want to do is you want to try and picture your feet are here and you want to try and turn them out. Your feet aren't going to move, but what that's going to do is just going to switch on your glutes, switch on your quads, and just help those knees stay out the whole time. Switch on your abductors. So, when you're here, think about spreading the floor with your feet. You're in that stance and you're going to hold that before you even start to squat. That's the leg component. Now, with your breathing, when you're in this position, big breath in. Now, when you do a big breath in, you're not just holding your breath. You're switching on your lower core, your upper core, everything. Just staying nice and tight.

[00:06:42]So, if you think about a empty water bottle, you don't have the lid on. When there's no compressed air, you can just squeeze it. As soon as you put the lid on, it's going to be hard to squish. So, we're essentially the water ball in this situation. If you brace properly, inhale, hold that air, you're going to stay nice and tight. You're not going to be able to crumble under the bar. So, bring breath in. You're bracing your lower core, especially upper core, nice and tight. So, that's our starting position. Every time I go, squeeze the upper back. Big breath in. Brace that lower core. My feet are slightly turned out. Picturing that spreading the floor with my feet. And then I'm ready to squat. From here, you want to think about hips, knees breaking at the same time, only going as far as your mobility allows. And then coming up with your eye gaze. Make sure you're not facing ahead the whole time cuz that's when you get that kink in your spine. You want to keep everything neutral. So, we avoid that. So, tight. Big breath in. Brace that core. Pulling those shoulder blades back. Knees out to your depth allows you. And then when you're here again, try not to let those elbows drop under heavier weight. It will feel like you want to, but try not to. Continuing on from our breathing. So big breath in.

[00:08:01]We're going down to that depth.

[00:08:04]Exhale. Once you get to the top, brace again. Ribs down. Eye gaze stays nice and neutral. We're driving up. And that's probably the key point is for the squat. Let's do deadlift. All right.

[00:08:14]Let's go through deadlift. I'll mainly touch on conventional and then at the end I'll slightly touch on sumo cuz it is pretty much the same setup. You're obviously just in that different foot positioning. So when we're setting up for the deadlift with our stance, you want to be in the position where you can generate the most force. So if you're not kind of sure how wide to put your feet, pretend you're taking a big jump.

[00:08:34]Wherever your feet naturally land, you're going to generate the most power.

[00:08:37]So for most people, it's about hipwidth apart. Uh but again, you can play around with that. So coming up to the barbell, you don't want to be right on the barbell with your shins. You want to allow a little bit of room because when you bend down into it, your shins will touch the bar and that's essentially the position we want to be in. So a lot of people with the deadlift either have hips too low and they're squatting it up, hips too high, and they're kind of hinging it up, or they just lose a lot of tension in their upper body, and then the load becomes too much for their back, and that's kind of where injuries start to happen. So coming in, the starting position is super important as well as getting tension on the bar. So with your starting position, you want hands just outside your shins. If it gets really heavy, you may want to go to the mix grip, but I'm not going to touch on that too much for now. Both overhand grip, thumbs over the bar. From here, you want to bend just so your shins touch the bar and then eye gaze slightly forward. Again, the whole point of a deadlift is you want to keep that neutral spine. So, if you're looking down, there's that kink. If you're looking straight ahead, there's a kink as well. So, you want to find a spot where it's a straight line all the way from your head to your tailbone. If you have a pole, you can kind of Is there a broom? If you have a pole like this one, you can put it over your back and kind of set that up position. So, hips back, head forward. You want to keep that neutral position. Again, really good with an RDL as well because a lot of people struggle with this. You can kind of practice that movement of everything keeping in line. So, coming back to the barbell, we've got our setup slightly away from the bar, hands outside, we bend down, shins slightly touch the bar, shoulders back. When I say shoulders back, imagine you're trying to pull your shoulders down to your hips. That's just going to instantly turn on your lats and help you stay tight throughout the whole movement. Again, trying to take that load off our back. Shins the bar.

[00:10:38]Shoulders down and back. Head slightly up about 2 meters in front of you. And that is our starting position. Now, the next part before we lift is we have to take the slack out of the bar. You probably hear this a lot online. You're like, I've heard it, but I actually have no idea what it means. What it means is with the barbell, there's a slight gap between the plate and the bar. If you just start pulling without taking that gap away, you're going to feel a jolt at the start of the movement. And when you go really heavy, that jolt is enough to bring you out of position, lose your tightness, and it's just not going to feel very good. So before we lift, we want to get rid of that. How we do that is we stay nice and tight, but we also want to grab the bar and pull and slightly lift it off the ground. Now, if I stay in this position, it's going to be hard. So, play around with this a little bit. It's going to feel a little bit weird if you haven't done it before, but if you really nail that, it shouldn't be it shouldn't be painful when you do add the weight on.

[00:11:48]So, here, nice and tight, head slightly forward, take the slack out of the bar, and then if we take the slack out of the bar properly, all you should have to do is push away with your feet. So, if you don't take the slack out of the bar, it'll feel like a a pulling movement and you won't be able to get that drive from your legs. So, think of deadlifts as a leg press. It's not a pulling movement at all. It should be a pushing movement.

[00:12:15]All the drive should come from your legs. Your upper body is just creating that tension essentially.

[00:12:21]Now, as we drive up, it's important to keep the bar as close to your legs as possible. As soon as that bar starts to come away from us, the center of mass isn't over our center of mass anymore, it's going to want to pull us forward. Again, putting more pressure on our back. So, keeping that bar as close to our legs as possible is again just going to avoid injury. it's going to be easier to get the bar up and just look better in general. So, everything we've learned, shoulders back, eye goes slightly forward. As we drive, we want to push with our legs, keep that bar on our legs the whole time, hips through at the top. When you're at the top, squeeze your glutes, shoulders to stay back, and then on the way down, you're just going to reverse it. So, hips back, keep that barbell on our legs. As we come to our knees, that's when we start to bend. So, what I don't want to see is when we're at the top, you bend your knees first. It should always be hips back, hinge, and then as the barbell gets to our knees, that's when we start to bend. And we should be back in that position. What can happen if you start to bend your knees first is you bend your knees first and you're in this position where your hips are way too low and you're pretty much squatting the movement using your quads rather than your hammies and your glutes. So really good habit to get into hinging first. Now with breathing super important when it comes to a deadlift because your core is very switched on with this. Same thing as our squat before we even lift. So as we're doing this big setup, big breath in and you brace at the same time.

[00:14:05]That breath is held all the way to the top. When you're at the top, you can release, but making sure you brace again as you go back down because you're still holding the weight. If you're doing a reset deadlift, you can stop at the ground, brace again, and then go again.

[00:14:22]Or there is another version of a touch and go deadlift. Essentially, touch and go, you're not resetting at the ground each time. Breathing will look a little bit different because you're not actually letting go of the weight at all. That's when you can breathe at the top and kind of get your breath back there. Um, if you are resetting, you'll do it at the bottom. So, what that looks like is touch and go. Brace, brace that core at the top, light touch, driving up. If you want to do that reset, resetting at the ground each time, explosive.

[00:14:57]With all these movements, there is a lot to unpack. on kind of just doing the basics for someone who's not sure about their form or just kind of wants to start. So if you are more advanced, there is definitely more knowledgeable and you know powerlifters and that sort of thing that can probably get a little bit more out of movement. But this is a good start. Now quickly touching on sumo, it is a wide stance. So different from our conventional. This time you do want to start with the barbell on your shins slightly turned out with your toes.

[00:15:32]Hands come in the middle again. Exactly same thing. Your shoulders are going to brace. But why I want your shins starting on the bar? Because as you come down, your knees should track outwards over your toes and not push the bar. So if you start on the bar, you come down and that bar rolls forward, your knees are caving in and you're not activating your glutes properly. So, it's a really good cue to make sure that your legs are in a good position. So, coming down, as you come down again, knees over your toes, barbell shouldn't move, shoulders down and back, eye gaze forward. Glutes should be activated with those knees pushing out. Again, remember our breathing that we learned before. Take the slack out of the bar. Squeeze those glutes as it comes up. Again, on the way down, hinging, hinging, hinging. When we get to our knees, that's when we can start to bend and finish in that strong starting position. And that's pretty much the basics of our deadlift. All right, last but not least, let's cover the hip thrust. I've seen a lot of good form. I've also seen some not so great form. So, let's go through it. I think the most common thing with hip thrust is not bracing core properly. I see a lot of people say that they're not confident in going heavy and they don't want to go heavy because they feel it in their lower back. Again, like any of these movements, as long as you've got a strong core and you brace it properly, it should protect your back from that.

[00:16:57]Um, that's why I do so much core throughout my week. Even I I train it as a normal muscle. Like, I don't just strip it on the end of my sessions just for the sake of it. I program it into my sessions. Treat it as, you know, like a shoulders. You won't you just do couple sets of shoulders at the end. You'll integrate it into your session and train it properly. Progressive over overload it like any other muscle. So, super important. Now, with a hip thrust, starting off with the bench height, you want to pick a height that when you come down, your shoulder blades are just on the bench. So, depending on what gym you're in, you may be more limited to the height of the bench. You can put a plate under your bum and then also under the plates of your barbell as well, just to give you that little bit higher edge.

[00:17:42]So once we kind of have our shoulder blades locked in. So without the barbell, the next most important thing is your feet placement. So again with our squats and our deadlifts, you don't want to be too close. You want to be nice and sturdy. Again, about hipwidth apart, you want to turn your feet slightly out, but not as exaggerated as we did in our squat. The other most important thing is the distance of your heel away from your bum. So if your feet are too close when you go up, your knees are going to push far over your toe and you're going to feel it more in your quads. If it is too far away, you'll go up and again you'll feel most in your hammies. So play around with that a little bit. I still have to check every time I go to make sure that it is at that nice right angle with our core.

[00:18:32]Essentially, you want to make sure your ribs are down and braced the entire time. As soon as I'm at the ground and those ribs are flared up, I can instantly tell my core is not engaged.

[00:18:42]My back is arching. And as I come up, I'm probably going to lead with my chest rather than my hips. And I'm going to feel it in the back. And I'm going to Yeah, it's just not going to look pretty. So, every time before I do my rep, bring those ribs down, brace your core, keep your eye gaze directly forward, and then as you come up, you kind of want to tuck your pelvis under.

[00:19:04]So, trying to think of how to best show this. So, right now you can see my pelvis is not tucked. If I move, tuck those hips under, ribs down, you'll feel it a lot more in your glutes. So, it's when you're flared out, you're probably going to struggle to feel it. So, ribs down, tuck that pelvis under, stay tight the entire time. What I said about the eye gaze is I make sure to look directly forward the entire time. This helps my ribs stay down because if I'm moving my head with my hips, it just doesn't allow me to brace my core properly. I know there are two ways of doing a hip thrust. I know you definitely can do this whilst bracing your core, but it's just how I learned to kind of put everything together. All right, let's get under barbell. So, make sure you have a pad. We don't want any bruised tips around here cuz it hurts, especially when you go heavy. We don't want that. Barbell pad on. Bringing our feet up. It should sit in that hip crease. Shoulder blades up on the bench.

[00:20:04]With our hands, it doesn't really matter too much where your hands are as long as when you do your rep, you push the bar away from you and you finish with straight arms. So, if you kind of stay loose with your hands and kind of just do your rep, one, it's a lot harder. It feels really awkward and the bar is going to roll towards you. So, we don't want that. As we come up, push to straight arms, get that full lock out, and then come back down. You won't really be able to get that full lock out if those arms are bent as well. So, putting everything we know together. Feet about hipwidth apart. Make sure it is at that sweet spot that when you go up, it is at that right angle. If you're not sure, you can do a rep without the barbell. Just figure it out first. hands wherever you feel comfortable after you've kind of played around with pushing the bar away.

[00:21:02]I gaze forward. Big breath in. Make sure those ribs are down and braced. Push that bar away. Eye gaze stays forward.

[00:21:10]Make sure you get that full extension.

[00:21:13]Really squeeze those hips at the top. I like to stay here for a moment or two.

[00:21:17]And then as I'm coming down again, we don't want to see those Oh, the barbell just rolled over. Another thing with the hit with the um padding, make sure the velcro is facing up cuz otherwise it will fall out like I just did. Don't copy me. So at the top when you're here, make sure those ribs are down the entire time. Our core is still on. And we're finishing at that position. So big breath in. Ribs are down. Pushing that barbell away. Keeping that core engaged the entire time. Now, with hip thrusts, I know there are lots of different variations. There's your cast hip thrust, there's your touch and go, there's your dead stop, whatever variation. They're all kind of under the same principle. So, what I just did is your reset or your dead stop. Obviously, you have your cast glute bridge as well where you're coming down halfway and squeezing up. Just keeping that constant tension and just doing that top range of motion. But whatever variation you do, just make sure your feet are in the right position. Your core is engaged the entire time. Um, your shoulder blades are sitting right on the bench. Eye gazes forward. Arms are pushing the barbell away as you go up and not letting it come towards you. And you're tucking your pelvis and you're tucking your pelvis under as you go to the top of the rep. I will quickly touch on the band. I personally love to use a band around my knees when I'm doing hip thrust. It doesn't do anything for muscle growth essentially, but it really helps with glute activation. It just kind of sends a message to your brain to keep your knees out the whole time and not let that cave in cuz obviously as we learned in our squat, when our knees are out, it activates those glute messes. So, an option there as well if you do want a little bit more mind muscle connection if you don't feel hip thrust a lot in your glutes. I'll show you how to quickly load and de load a bar because I know when doing hip thrusts a lot of people avoid going really heavy because they just can't be bothered putting on and taking off the plates, which I get it because it's a lot. So, easy way is if you come in the other way, sit it in front and kind of just scoop rather than like going this way and trying to like awkwardly put it on.

[00:23:29]And then as you're taking it off, a trick, if you are going super heavy and you have a lot of plates on there, you can get a little like 1.5 or whatever in the gym, you can roll the first plate on and then you can easily start it off. And then as you're continually de loing, I like to fully unload one side first. And then if you have heaps of plates on the other end, you can tip the barbell up and take all the rest off. And it's so easy. And that's the three movements. I hope I covered like the basics and kind of gave you a little bit more confidence and knowledge to attack the three movements. Uh like I said, form is so important. Don't try and go heavier if you don't feel confident in your form because obviously that's when injuries happen. And I'm so big on form like you'll see it in my videos. I try to really nail that before I do load up. If you didn't know, I have programs. I've got a hybrid program. I've got a compete program which is the Hierrox program.

[00:24:36]I've got a half marathon program which is more like a hybrid version. So you can check that out. I'm in the Move with us gym now and I have them on the Move With Us app. So, let me know if you actually like these types of videos as well. It's very different for me. I'm putting like my coaching hat back on.

[00:24:53]Um, but yeah, let me know if there's any other movements you want or like I can collab with other coaches or experts in their area to kind of run me through stuff as well because I know a lot of knowledgeable people in the industry.

[00:25:04]So, if you do enjoy these, I can definitely do more. But thanks for watching and I hope you like this