Knee in the deadlift

[intermtrainee]

When you deadlift, you lock the knee only immediately before and unlock immediately after the lockout. You bend them a bit, but not so much, that the bar can't go up and down in a straight line.
Before knowing this, locking for me was a straight leg with no knee bend.
So, I misunderstood this locking and I had the habit to do what you refer to "locking". I locked my knees as soon as the bar passed the knee. And unlocked them only when they passed this point on the way down.

I am interested in why you bend your knees almost all the time during a deadlift. What happens, if you don't?

[Satch12879]

The exercise turns into a stiff-legged deadlift.

[Adam Skillin]

Assuming a proper set-up, the mechanical constraints of lifting the barbell in a vertical fashion while maintaining contact with the legs will make worrying about the precise timing when the knee locks or unlocks unnecessary. The teaching model involves telling the trainee to drag the bar up his legs, and the go-to cue for resolving this issue would be to tell the lifter to keep the bar on his legs, not to talk about when his knees lock/unlock.

If the knees lock or unlock at the wrong time, one of two things will have to happen. Either the bar will move non-vertically (behind the mid-foot), or the legs and the bar will lose contact at some point. If the bar is sufficiently heavy, the only possible outcome of mis-timing the knees' lockout is a loss of contact between bar and legs, for reasons that are intuitively obvious. So keep the bar in contact with your legs. Just worry about that, not the knees.

As a related aside, all the models of the lifts contain aspects that rarely, if ever, need to be mentioned in order to teach and coach the trainee do them correctly. The shrug in the power clean is another example. Rip and staff teach very nearly everyone to power clean without ever uttering the word "shrug," and every single trainee, 100%, learn to shrug during the power clean instruction. This is a significant aspect of the elegance of the teaching models that Rip has laid out for us.

[Elephant]

I thought the main purpose of a slight knee bend in the setup, then starting to straighten on the way up, was to use the quads (and other relevant leg straightening muscles) to help get the bar moving off the floor. Once that happens, the knee action is less relevant.

I've focused on pulling the bar back to my legs (lats, etc.) in order to keep contact, rather than on knee movement and lock-out timing in order to keep contact.

Are one or both of these wrong?

[Adam Skillin]

I thought the main purpose of a slight knee bend in the setup, then starting to straighten on the way up, was to use the quads (and other relevant leg straightening muscles) to help get the bar moving off the floor. Once that happens, the knee action is less relevant.

I've focused on pulling the bar back to my legs (lats, etc.) in order to keep contact, rather than on knee movement and lock-out timing in order to keep contact.

Are one or both of these wrong?

No. Neither of these things is wrong. The point I'm making is that the timing of the knees is not something the teaching method calls for having a trainee think about. "Keep the bar in contact with the legs" is a cue, and "Use your lats (to keep the bar in contact with the legs)" is a related, but different cue.

If someone locks the knees all the way before the back angle changes sufficiently, contracting the lats might not be the most useful thing to have a lifter think about. On the other hand, if a lifter lets the bar drift forward and the loss of contact is due to failing to appropriately use the lats rather than mis-timing the knee and hip extension, the lats cue might be more appropriate. Different lifters find different ways to screw things up, we have a myriad of established cues that have proven useful for addressing them, and we even know how to make up new ones when we need to. Make sense?

[Elephant]

Makes sense.

I agree with your earlier post and didn't mean mine as any sort of disagreement on yours. My comment about knee bend and using the legs to help get started was more a reaction to Satch.

My internal cue is "Keep the bar in contact with the legs" rather than thinking about lats. I just mentioned lats because they seem relevant and many people don't realize lats are involved in DLs. I don't really think about knee lock timing. Focusing on that sort of detail seems more likely to confuse for the majority of lifters.

I haven't really thought about knee timing when the bar drifts forward of my legs. I thought it was due to failure to focus on keeping the bar in contact. I suppose the next time that happens, I should video and, if I can't figure out the problem, post the video.

[intermtrainee]

Then I am glad I did everything right although I never thought about the knee locking.
I have another short question, which in the first place led me to questioning my technique:

When I have no bend in my knees (just the femur moving), I have much pull on my hamstrings when the hip is back. In the video about the RDL rip teaches to bend the knees a little before bending at the hips. This is special to the RDL, right? It is just that my hamstrings feel a lot better, when my knees are slightly bend.
Doing RDL without this short bend feels like a stretch. This is why I began wondering, whether I was doing the deadlift itself wrong.

[Adam Skillin]

When I have no bend in my knees (just the femur moving), I have much pull on my hamstrings when the hip is back.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. At what point during the lift are you talking about?

In the video about the RDL rip teaches to bend the knees a little before bending at the hips. This is special to the RDL, right? It is just that my hamstrings feel a lot better, when my knees are slightly bend.

Are you talking about the eccentric portion of the deadlift or the setup or what? I'm confused.

[intermtrainee]

I'm talking about the point when you did bend your hip and the bar is just below the knee, so the lower end of the range of motion of a RDL. Or similar point in the eccentric of a deadlift.

[Adam Skillin]

I'm talking about the point when you did bend your hip and the bar is just below the knee, so the lower end of the range of motion of a RDL. Or similar point in the eccentric of a deadlift.

Once the bar is below your knee, and the knee is already bent a little bit., you continue to bend it in the eccentric portion of the deadlift, and put the bar down. You do not in the RDL.