So you’re looking to add weight to your deadlift—join the club. For most people the solution is straightforward: Put more weight on the bar. Loading up five more pounds each week is the easiest way to jack those numbers up, and that strategy will work for true beginners for way longer than you might think. But once you’ve reached an impasse with that strategy—which, trust me, you will—there are a few other things you can do to keep improving upon your personal best.

To gather the best tips for the task, we hit up Sam Shethar, amateur strongman/professional strong guy with an 880-pound conventional deadlift. Not only is Shethar an absolute hoss, he’s also a strength coach by trade, and has helped eight of his clients get to an 800-pound deadlift, 40 more get to a 600-pound deadlift, and countless others (myself included) lift heavier with his massive catalog of informational YouTube videos. So pull up your notes app, reheat that ground beef and rice, and let’s dig in.

Intensity is important, but form is king

Bringing a good level of intensity when you’re training is key, no doubt, and giving up on your pulls when they get hard is a surefire way to never see gains. But when it comes to deadlifting, Shethar says, form is a lot more important than you’d think. “There’s a pretty solid percentage of lifters who have made their way into intermediate status without getting their technique particularly serviceable,” he says. “The problem is that they run into the limitations of what their current technique can do. If they keep trying to fit a round peg (bad technique) into a square hole (increasing your max), it’s pretty likely that they’re going to get injured.” The solution? Stripping off some weight while you dial in your technique—that will give you a bigger runway for increasing your deadlift than spinning your wheels with gross form. But what exactly is “good” form?

“Good deadlift technique lets lifters spread the load across more muscles, instead of just seeing how strong their low back is,” Shethar says. Some common mistakes he sees lifters make are excessive lumbar rounding and having an underdeveloped hip hinge. “I see so many people going down to the bar with a round back, then flattening their back and trying to correct that bad starting position,” he says. The fix: Nail the starting position by grabbing the bar without rounding in the first place, lock in the flat back position, and pull from there.

Pick the right assistance movements

Strength is specific, Shethar reminds me, so if we want to get stronger at a movement, the best thing to do is that exact movement—in this case, deadlifting. That’s because not only are we making the primary movers of the lift bigger and stronger when we do the actual lift, we’re also getting a lot of practice doing the lift, which “greases the groove,” or makes you more efficient at the task you’re trying to accomplish, he explains. Deadlifts, though, are particularly taxing on the body—and deadlifting alone probably isn’t enough to drive adaptation across all the relevant musculature, Sam says. He generally wants to see lifters hitting flat-back Romanian deadlifts either on their deadlift day as a warm up or on a second day during the week. “The majority of people don’t need to deadlift more than once a week, but a lot of people would benefit from a second day of (significantly lighter) RDLs,” he says. That’s not only to beef up the muscles of your posterior chain—that’s the hamstrings, glutes, and low back—but to ingrain the hip hinge pattern and help dial in your technique. “One thing to remember about RDLs is that we’re not doing range of motion for range of motion’s sake,” he says. “Go as far down as you can with a flat back, getting a good stretch in your hamstrings, then as soon as you feel your back about to round, go back up. If you’re rounding and unrounding your back when you’re doing RDLs, [your low back] is what’s getting trained, and you’re already getting enough low back stimulus with your deadlift.”

The other thing Shethar emphasizes is fitting in a vertical pull (ex. Pull-ups or pull-downs) and a horizontal pull (like a dumbbell row or cable row) at some point during the week, though he says which exact exercise you choose for these slots doesn’t really matter. “Your back isn’t the biggest primary mover when it comes to your deadlift,” he says. “It’s the legs, glutes, and hamstrings that are doing most of the work, but the upper back is still important. If your shoulder blades are getting tugged forward, you’re gonna have a hard time picking weight up off the floor.” As for leg work, Shethar says that if you’re progressing your squats independently of your deadlift, you’ll probably have all the general leg power you need for deadlifting, but if you’re not squatting or doing a squat-patterned motion (think: leg press, hack squat, split squat, etc.) it’s a good idea to start, since quad strength is crucial for power off the floor. Lastly, taking the time to build up work capacity and do a few solid sets of back extensions and hamstring curls after you deadlift is going to contribute to your long-term progress.