Worried about Deadlifting? Don’t be!

Keeping the bar close

The most important point is keeping the bar close to your body: the reason we do this is due to torque.  

Torque is a rotational force, when we lift any weight there is a force applied on our body and this increases with distance further away from your body. A good example of this is lifting a weight above your head as  you normally would by bending your arm, and then trying to do the same thing but with a straight arm the whole time, it’s way harder! Torque is the reason for this.  

Let’s calculate torque for a 40kg deadlift.  

Torque = force x distance  

Torque = 400 x distance  

In this case our force is the mass you are lifting (40kg) times gravity (we’ll use 10m/s for simplicity). This won’t change over our lifting session unless we add more weight to the bar. What can change is the distance the bar is  from our body. If you move the bar from touching your body to 10cm or 0.1m further out you are increasing the torque by 400 x 0.1 = 40Nm.