Most deadlift form-check footage answers none of the questions it was filmed to answer. Shot from a random diagonal, cropped at the knees, phone propped at ankle height against a water bottle — the resulting clip can't show the hinge, hides the lockout, and turns every reviewer (human or AI) into a guesser. The fix costs five minutes and zero dollars. Here's the setup.

Side-on, and why

Put the camera directly to your side. The deadlift's most important stories — the hinge, the back angle, the bar's path, the lockout — all live in the side view. From the side you can see whether the hips sit between knees and shoulders at setup, whether hips and shoulders rise together or the hips shoot up alone, whether the spine holds one shape or rounds mid-pull, whether the bar rides close to the legs, and whether the finish arrives tall and plumb or stops an inch early. From the front, every one of those flattens into nothing.

The front view has its own job — symmetry and grip width, and for sumo pullers it's where knee symmetry shows — so it makes a fine second angle. But if you're filming one clip, film the side.

The checklist

  • Phone at hip height, 8 to 12 feet away. Hip height keeps the geometry honest — a phone on the floor angled upward distorts every angle you're trying to check. A bench, a box, or a cheap tripod gets you there.
  • Whole body in frame, head to feet, plates visible for the entire rep. If the frame crops your feet, nobody can see the bar's relationship to mid-foot; crop the head and the lockout story is gone. Landscape orientation helps.
  • Steady camera. Propped or mounted, never handheld by a friend trying their best.
  • One to three reps per clip. Short clips keep the footage focused on reps you actually want read — and a couple of honest working reps tell more truth than a marathon set.
  • Wear something with contrast against the background. Dark clothes against a dark gym wall make joints hard to track — for AI review especially, but for human eyes too.

What to do with the footage

First, watch it yourself — you'll catch more than you expect. Freeze the setup frame: hips between knees and shoulders? Scrub to just after the bar breaks: did hips and shoulders leave together? Watch the hands mid-pull: close to the legs, or drifting forward? Check the final frame: standing tall, or an almost-lockout? Compare your back's shape at the floor against mid-shin.

Then get a second set of eyes. This exact setup — side-on, hip height, whole body plus plates, one to three reps — is precisely what CoachVision is built to read. Upload the clip, tell it your variant (conventional, sumo, RDL or trap bar, so it grades each by its own standard), and its AI coach returns a measured read on your hinge, back angle, bar path, lockout and tempo, plus the one fix to work on first. The scores come from measured, body-tracked checkpoints — a coach's eye backed by real numbers — and a measured read on good footage beats years of guessing at the feel.

Five minutes of setup, one clip a week, same angle every time. The consistent angle is the quiet superpower: week over week, you can watch the fault actually shrink.