Form Question about Dead Lifting

[Bosch232]

Earlier this week I filmed myself dead lifting to see my own form on my heaviest set. Here's what I saw: At the bottom of the lift, I seem to be raising my hips about 2" just a moment before my upper body begins to pull the bar up.

My understanding is that your body as a whole should initiate the lift. Not hips-first-followed-by-back/upper body. How critical is this?

[Cards]

video

[Niko_El_Piko]

Earlier this week I filmed myself dead lifting to see my own form on my heaviest set. Here's what I saw: At the bottom of the lift, I seem to be raising my hips about 2" just a moment before my upper body begins to pull the bar up.

My understanding is that your body as a whole should initiate the lift. Not hips-first-followed-by-back/upper body. How critical is this?

Correct.
If you upload the video, you should get good feedback.

[Bosch232]

Sorry that the camera is out of focus.
I set it up quickly and discreetly, and it failed to pull focus.

315 lbs, mixed grip, left palm facing away.
This is rep 2 and 3 of six reps.

[GazzyG]

Yup, that does hurt your strength. Until I learned to stop that happening, I couldn't break past a certain weight as it just turns it into a SLDL.

Keep head up and think about pulling back not up. Sounds easier than it is lol. Once I started doing it though, my DL shot up about 40lbs overnight.

[JSully]

think chest high, shoulders back, hips down. Then grab the bar and lock it in place with your lats (strong contraction). Like everyone else said, pull back, not up. It should slide up your shins and your thighs. The thinking about the lat contraction helps me to keep my back locked in place. It's just a mental cue for me.

[Bosch232]

Thanks for the feedback. It's surprising what you see yourself doing when you look through a camera. Glad I did this.

[Tom Mutaffis]

There are a couple of things that I noticed with the video:

1. Seems like your knees are caving in a bit at the bottom of the lift, an easy fix for this would be to point your toes outward slightly to engage your legs a bit more.
2. You appear to be using a lot of back and less legs/hips - almost like a modified SLDL. I would work to drop your hips more and drive your heels through the floor. Ideally you want to keep a flat back throughout the lift.

My advice on deadlifting is to keep the reps down if you are working on technique - but to keep the volume similar by adding in more sets. For example, instead of doing 5x5 you may want to go with 8 sets of 3 with the same weight, this will allow you to really focus on quality reps and being in good position for each rep. When you become fatigued later in a set is when you become more likely to injure yourself due to technique breaking down.

Hope this helps... video is definitely a good way to critique your form since like you mentioned it is surprising to see how things actually look from an outsider perspective.