What Does It Really Mean to “lift Weights With Your Legs”?
If the phrase “lift heavy things with your legs” has never resonated with you, you’re not alone. Attempting to follow this advice can feel awkward, unnatural, and ineffective—though there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. A 1993 study found that even when warehouse workers were trained to “lift heavy things with their legs” and even when they claimed to do their best to follow instructions, lifting heavy things by the book was virtually impossible in most cases.
Why Everyone Wants You to Lift Weights with Your Legs
The main goal of lifting with your legs is to avoid one specific mistake: excessive slouching, which increases the risk of a herniated disc. If you lift while squatting with an upright back, you avoid this mistake. In this case, the lift becomes a squat: your back doesn’t bend, but your legs and hips do.
Weighted squats are very effective when lifting something heavy, like a table. Instead of slouching, bend your knees, grasp the object with your arms, and then straighten your legs to stand up.
But when you’re lifting something off the floor, squats aren’t actually very effective, as workers in 1993 demonstrated. You need to somehow lift the object off the ground, and most people don’t have the mobility to initiate a squat entirely from the floor. If you’re used to doing squats and deadlifts, you’ll notice another problem: weights that are difficult to lift in a squat (especially from a deep squat) are often much easier to lift in a deadlift because your back and hips are stronger than your legs.
In fact, using your back when lifting weights is not only acceptable but sometimes even necessary. However, to do it correctly, you need to pay attention to how you use your back during the lift. Constant jokes like “lift with your legs” are meant to get around this problem—you can’t lift weights incorrectly using your back if you’ve never done it before! But, again, we come back to the problem of how the advice “lift with your legs” doesn’t always provide all the necessary tools for real-world training.
What should you actually do instead of lifting weights with your legs?
In reality, you can move your body the way you want as long as you keep your back relatively straight—stabilized by all those helpful core muscles. I like how Duke University’s Environmental Health and Safety Administration boils down lifting technique to two simple rules :
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Keep the load close to your body throughout the lift. Press the load into your stomach. You can do this by kneeling on one knee or squatting asymmetrically, so you’re almost sitting astride the object you’re lifting.
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Maintain the natural curves of your spine, especially the arch in your lower back . Try to maintain a neutral spine position, as you would when standing or walking.
This last point may seem a little difficult to understand, but it simply means that you shouldn’t bend your back or torso too much. Don’t slouch like a rainbow or arch your back like a banana. If you bend over, use your hips as a hinge, not your back.
If you master these two rules, you’ll protect your back without resorting to unnatural and awkward postures. Sometimes you see clichéd illustrations of weightlifting technique where a person squats to pick up a box, but then holds it in front of them—nobody does that, and it doesn’t even make sense. Your “power zone,” where you can lift the most weight, is when the object is held against your stomach. Holding it against your chest or thighs will be almost as effective. As soon as you start holding it higher, lower, or further away from your body, you won’t be able to safely lift the same amount of weight. ( This weightlifting guide has more illustrations showing how to safely lift heavy boxes.)
These two rules also explain why the deadlift can be a safe exercise in the gym: people performing it ensure their spine remains in a neutral position and the weight stays close to their body. There’s more than one safe way to lift weights.