It’s Time To Talk About Squats!

Everyone knows what a squat is. Whether you are in your home attempting to pick something up or at the gym and attempting a barbell back squat—it’s a movement that we all frequently do and hope to do for the rest of our lives. Squatting in the gym helps your balance and posture, strengthens your core, and helps burn even more calories. The problem is, people don’t necessarily know how to do them correctly or they think squatting with a straight bar is the only way to do it. Hopefully today I can shed some light on both topics. 

To perform a squat correctly, you need to focus on a few things. First the setup. To squat with a bar on your back or just body weight, you need to find the right foot location. This is different for everybody. Based on individual preference, some people prefer their feet close together, others position them wider apart. A great test I like to use is to do a low box jump and see how you land. You’re typically going to land in a natural quarter squat but your body knows what’s best for you, so however you land on that box is a good place to start for your foot set up.  However far apart you have your feet, you should always point the toes outward slightly. This is for your hip function, so make sure your femur and hip socket do not pinch when you squat. 

Now that you have your foot placement, it’s onto the squat movement. Before you start the movement, you want to focus on your breath. You want to take a deep breath and brace your core. You need a “circumferential brace” which means you are flexing all of the muscles in your core and surrounding your spine. To start the movement you want to push your hips back slightly, then bend at your knees to lower your whole body while keeping a straight back, then push through the center of your foot to stand back up, and exhale. If you are doing a back squat, you’ll want to pull your shoulder blades together to kind of flex your traps and give the bar a little cushion to rest on. Things go wrong for people when they allow themselves to roll to their toes as they squat back up instead of pushing through the center of their foot. This is important because if you roll to your toes to squat, then all of your weight is now being put on your knees instead of being dispersed throughout the legs and stabilized by your feet. 

Take it from me, before I had a strength coach, I squatted wrong for years which has created a lifetime of negative impact on my knees. If you find it merely impossible to not roll to your toes causing your heel to come off of the ground, then this may be an ankle mobility issue. This is easy to see but like anything, will take some work to fix. Also, people tend to quit bending at their knees to get lower and end up bending more at their hip. This is typically because of a lack of mobility in the hips but can really be the result of a number of different problems. For a great warm-up, I suggest wall squats. A wall squat is where you perform a squat while facing and standing a few inches away from the wall. If you can’t do it without head butting the wall, then you are bending too much at your hips and you need to identify why. 

Finally, the last big thing I look for is knee valgus. This is when your knees cave in towards each other while performing a squat with little to moderate resistance. When you go super heavy, this is normal. It’s not recommended, but it happens. It’s an issue when you aren’t exerting a lot of energy and your knees still cave. This could be from a number of issues, but most commonly it's poor coaching or from weak hips and glutes. Poor coaching is an easy fix but how are you supposed to do a squat correctly if you were never taught the proper form. I tell people to think about spreading the floor when coming back up. If your feet were on a piece of paper, think about trying to pull that paper with your feet to rip it in half as you squat up. If it’s weak hips and glutes, then there are a number of different accessory movements that work, including but not limited to band workouts! 

With all that being said, a barbell back squat is not the only way to get a good squat workout in and to be honest, I don’t build it into a customer's program until I feel like they are ready.  We progress to barbell back squats by first perfecting the bodyweight squat, then the goblet squat, and then adding the bar to our back. A bodyweight squat will prove that you understand the movement, and a goblet squat is where you hold a dumbbell or kettlebell in front of you in order to slightly overload the squat movement. When we start to overload our squat, we learn how to brace our core in order to protect our spine. Once we see that everything is looking good in terms of position and stance, then we graduate to using the bar and performing the barbell back squat. It’s important to remember that variety is key and even when you master the most popular form of squatting, you still want to work on other forms of squats to work different muscles and remind yourself of what good form really feels like.

Regardless of the level of squat a customer has graduated to, I still plan for body weight, goblet, single leg squats and use specialty bars for more variations. Single-leg squats like rear foot elevated squats (bulgarian split squats) and pistol squats are just a few great variations in order to unilaterally train the squat movement. Most sports, and all running, is done on one foot so we need to train to improve these actions. Even if you’re not an athlete, single-leg training will help you balance and make sure you are not overcompensating for one leg by doing most of the work on the other leg. One of the specialty bars that we use frequently is the safety squat bar. This bar has pads around the neck and it includes handles to hold onto. This bar helps to take some stress off of the shoulders by not having your hands up and behind your back while squatting.  When squatting using a bar, your shoulders are put in a very awkward position which adds a lot of unnecessary stress. Consider basketball players or any athlete whose sport requires a lot of movement with their arms overhead. I try to use this bar while approaching the various athletic seasons to keep their shoulders healthy. I also use it for anyone who doesn’t HAVE to do a barbell back squat. Athletes going to college to compete will likely have to do this sort of squat so form and safety are critical, but average joes like myself, can avoid having to do a traditional barbell back squat. Anyone who thinks they must squat with a straight bar on their back and there’s no other way is living in the past. Science and technology have proven that it’s unnecessary and there are more ways to skin that cat! 

With any major movement there are a ton of nuances and minor adjustments that a trained professional can work to monitor and improve. The squat, if done correctly or incorrectly, can be very beneficial or dangerous.Please do not attempt a heavy squat without being trained by someone in person and even after you learn, always have the safety bars up so you are prepared if you cannot complete the lift! 

- Coach Tom