A lot of people are using their unprecedented downtime in quarantine to work on their personal fitness and step up their training via home workouts. And that includes Method Man, who is looking hella jacked these days. The rapper and founder of Tical Athletics has been posting regular updates to his Instagram as he’s progressed with his strength training, and over the weekend he shared a video of himself pulling 435 pounds in a deadlift PR.

In addition to showing off his strength in the video, Method also demonstrates that he’s clearly been working on refining his lifting technique. In particular, he has got good control of his eccentric movement, lowering the weight slowly after completing each rep instead of just dropping it.

“This is a pretty clean deadlift overall,” says Men’s Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel C.S.C.S. “His hips never rise above the shoulders, and his core stays pretty tight… If there’s a nitpick, it’s that his head doesn’t stay neutral; he’d benefit from shifting his gaze toward the floor instead of looking straight ahead. But that’s a common flaw.”

Technique is incredibly important in the deadlift. Former World’s Strongest Man Eddie Hall, who until very recently held the world record for heaviest deadlift, recently said that he believes it’s actually one of the most technical strongman events, and needs the correct foundation to maximize performance and avoid injury. One thing that all lifters should be doing ahead of the deadlift is a proper warmup, such as goblet squats, hip airplanes, bridges, and bird dogs, to prime their core, hips and glutes.

If you want to up your lifting game, but you hate the barbell (or just don’t have access to one at home), try these deadlift variations, which switch the bar for a kettlebell.


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