Here is another GREAT re-post from Greg Robin's blog Gregtrainer
There are a lot of different squat variations. Each one offers a different benefit, and each one is different mechanically. A common problem I see with the low bar back squat is what people do with their hips in the descent, the hole, and right out of the hole. Additionally there seems to be some confusion on the acceptable amount of forward lean, or angle of the back.
When the bar is positioned on the spine of the scapula and the stance is moderate to wide many people have a tendency to come forward in the squat. It may be that they are quad dominant, or that they have mobility issues somewhere in the chain (ankles, hips, upper back / shoulder girdle). However, I think that many times the lift is mis-coached and or misunderstood.
One thing you need to come to grips with right away is the difference between obtaining a lot of hip flexion and therefore “leaning” forward, and dumping forward because of a lack of thoracic extension or improper placement of the weight back on the heel to mid foot.
In reality when the back squat is performed correctly it does seem as though you are leaning quite a bit, the back angle is about 45 degrees or more. Check out this picture:
Notice that the chest is virtually in the lap of the girl pictured above. Although you hear all the time that back angle should equal shin angle, that really isn’t true. The Olympic style high bar squat would be the closest variation to achieving equal angles. In the “lower” bar back squat the back angle will generally be greater than the shin angle. Opposite let’s say to the front squat, where the shin angle generally exceeds the back angle. The bottom line is that the bar needs to be over the mid foot / heel to keep the resistance over the mid-line of the body.
Here’s the often seen drawing of the front squat and high bar back squat which you can use in comparison to the picture above:
In the lower bar position you are able to effectively leverage against the weight and recruit the muscles which are largely responsible for extending the hips (ie hamstrings and glutes). Yes the quads are working hard, but hardly working alone in this squat pattern. The hips become a much bigger player in this squat than other variations. Are the spinal erectors working hard, yes they are, so what. If everything is in line (technique and health wise) then you are building a stronger back, and I see no issue with this.
I find a lot of the people I work with have misinterpreted cues from other coaches, received poor instruction and / or don’t understand the leverages in the low bar back squat. They associate cues such as “keep the chest up” or “get tall” to mean keep an upright as possible upper body position. When you couple this with hearing cues to “sit back” or “push the butt out” the two begin to work against each other. As they push the hips back and begin to flex the hips as much as possible the pelvis moves into a forwardly tilted position. As the pelvis tilts forward the angle of the spine will also change relative to the position of the pelvis. As the squatter resists the urge to achieve a safe amount of forward lean the pelvis can no longer tilt forward, with each subsequent inch of depth the knees move forward, and inevitably this make the knees the predominant lever and the quads begin to take over.
The upright torso position is not what we are after. Similar to the deadlift, what we want instead is to maintain extension in the lumbar and thoracic spine while the angle of the torso increases keeping the weight over the mid-line of the body. When the bar is positioned lower on the back this equates to a more predominate forward lean, let it happen. I find that a lot of descent issues can be cleared up by having people arch the lower back hard, opening the hips, and flaring out the glute meds (outward pressure on the feet) all before starting the descent. Some people try to do all of that and initiate the descent at the same time and end up throwing themselves forward or never achieving enough lumbar extension.
Many times people will do an adequate job of getting to the hole correctly and this shift in weight won’t occur until the concentric (upward) portion of the lift. I think Rippetoe talks about this in Starting Strength when he uses the image of a string attached to the tailbone. He wants people to imagine someone pulling straight up on the string as the tailbone essentially comes straight up out of the hole, not forward.
Often times I will actively push my fist into someones lower back and tell them to push against my hand as they come out of the hole. If they stay tight in the back as they push my hand this will teach them what it feels like to have the hips and shoulders move up simultaneously as opposed to the shoulders moving up first (causing the knees to come forward). When I first understood this concept, and many of the people I train have agreed, it almost feels as though you are pushing the hips back out of the hole. This is because you are initiating the lift out of the hole from the hips, not the legs (knees). For someone like myself who was introduced to low bar back squatting after years of front squatting this can be a tough concept. When you / they have that AH HA moment the low bar back squat begins to feel better, make a lot more sense, and dare I say get easier. Here is a video of Jim Wendler using the cue I am talking about at a seminar held at Total Performance Sports.
I think the low bar back squat is a great exercise when done correctly. All to often the confusion comes from how much lean of the torso is appropriate. This squat variation turns the squat into a much more equal movement in terms of the hips and knees sharing the load. It is a great option for those who can safely perform it, especially people (and there are a lot of them) who are quad dominant. I hope this clears up some confusion on the technique. I’ll leave you with this video of Wendler taking 505 for a triple. Watch for everything we just talked about. Pause at 0:19 to see where his hips are right out of the hole.
Writing a solid program is important. I find programming to be a hot topic, and for good reason – it’s interesting! As coaches it’s an obvious choice to write about because the options are plentiful. There are an overwhelming amount of exercises and a seemingly infinite amount of ways to organize someone’s training. When a coach writes a program they have a lot of variables to manage. This makes for great content and promotes a lot of discussion as to what the best way to go about basically the same task is.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t put time into programming. I’d also be lying if I said that I don’t think the way I program is the best way to do it (I know of). I’m not saying there isn’t a better way – that’s why I’m always reading, learning, and most importantly doing. However, if you have:
a reason for what you’re writing
and that reason is the accumulation of all that you know about this stuff
and you apply it to the person at hand’s needs
then you should think the way you’re going about training is the best way. I think there would be a bigger issue if you did not. It’s not taking an absolute stance to say that, it’s what you should believe if you’re prepared.
Writing a program is not as easy as just choosing some good exercises and having balance. After all, if you give an unbalanced person a balanced program they are still going to be unbalanced when it’s over. Or what if you take the time to develop the best program you can and they don’t do it? Additionally, what if they do the whole program without performing the majority of the movements correctly?
While the variables that go into writing a program are all important considerations, having a program itself is a variable on a much more important level. In reality the program is not the most important variable at all.
Here are some other factors that will have a much larger effect on the success of your client and your own training:
Assessing:
The assessment is crucial to the whole process. Like we always say: if you’re not assessing, you’re just guessing. I like to think the assessment starts the first time I meet someone and really never ends; assess and re-assess. The assessment process should include all the following:
Posture
Movement Quality
Flexibility / Stability / Mobility
Performance
Lifestyle
Goals
Attitude
Training History
Medical History
Without a detailed assessment, and the mindset of continual assessment, you will have a hard time getting anywhere. As you can see most of the second tier variables are gathered during this process.
2. Technique Coaching / Cueing:
As a trainer or coach this is a HUGE part of what you do! There are plenty of intelligent people writing programs online. Many of the good ones even do an assessment. However, they aren’t there to coach the lifts and this can lead to a lot of technique issues. The ability to teach the lifts well is going to shorten the learning curve tremendously. The faster you are able to get people doing things right the faster they can start making progress safely. It is important as a coach that you make it to hands on seminars, spend time under the bar yourself, and of course…coach people. As far as your own training goes, seek out someone who can teach you. Surround yourself with people who do things right and learn from them.
3. Compliance / Accountability:
Anything works if you do it consistently. Squats work and so do foot elevated split squats. Olympic lifts work and so do jumps and med ball work. Hour long “cardio” works and so does high intensity interval training. You just have to do it right and do it often. Therefore, the medium in which you use to facilitate a certain result pales in comparison to the importance of getting people, or yourself, to show up. Put systems in place to monitor compliance. Make sure (based on your assessment) you develop a plan that can be adhered to.
4. Training Management:
This kind of piggy backs on the previous areas. You need to intelligently monitor yours and your client’s training. The perfect program doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It’s important to listen to your body and adjust accordingly. It’s also important to develop an eye for monitoring your client. Maybe they didn’t sleep last night or just aren’t recovering from the training load, who knows, but you have to be flexible. If the bar speed on a warm up set looks or feels slow maybe you don’t push the working sets to where they were written for that day. If you know your client is dragging ass, don’t push them where their body isn’t ready to go. Ask questions, be observant and adjust.
5. Intangibles:
You have little control over this. Some people are wired differently than others. The fact is, the simple program executed with unyielding effort will produce more results than the complex program executed with little effort. That being said, understand the type of person you are, or that you are working with. Apply a training method that plays into their character. I am not a huge fan of giving people things to do that just mindlessly run them into the ground but inserted reasonably to develop mental fortitude it can have a purpose. Other people need to be engaged all the time, pairing mobility drills with an exercise can force them to rest appropriately between sets.
In ending, I wrote this post to help people and coaches prioritize what’s important. There’s no reason you can’t take these areas into account AND write a solid program to boot. Realize that in 90% of the cases it’s not the program that makes the difference. If the larger variables are considered the program is a catalyst.
I remember a time in the dark ages many years ago when we started adding Strongman training to athletes and regular clients programming at TPS.
There was an outcry from lots of "professional" trainers and coaches on the internet and at a few seminars that I had attended that doing this was sure to cause catastrophic injury to all of our clients and athletes. In the entire time that we have been doing this at TPS with clients (not Strongman competitors) we have not had 1 injury from this. Of course with Strongman competitors we see injury all the time. This is due to the massive weights that they handle. There is no way around injury for a competitor. With clients, you need to load the events much lighter, but still heavy enough to get a training effect. Loading the clients training properly PREVENTS injury. It does not cause it.
I also wrote an article for a magazine predicting that this was the wave of the future, as it was the ultimate form of "functional" training. Not the nonsense you see done at most places. I was called a lot of different names by some, including idiot and .some that were not so nice.
It seems that I may have been correct as it is now being done EVERYWHERE.
I am happy to see it too. I am sad when people do it wrong. here is a video from theToday Show where it look like they are doing a decent job at it.
Here is a great repost from gregtrainer.com, Greg Robins' blog.
Let it be known I am not a woman. However, I do train / have trained A LOT of women. While the following post is not written by a woman I assure you it will help. This post is based on a simple fact: Women do not have the same amount of neuromuscular coordination as men.
What on earth does that mean?
“A coordinated cooperation between the muscles which are activated for the performance of one movement, so that their contractions occur at an expedient force and at the right time of the movement. Moreover, the antagonists are suitably relaxed so that they do not offer unnecessary resistance to the movement.” As an example, even at a high level women’s sports are slower, playing fields are sometimes smaller and records are generally slower and / or shorter. This is not because these ladies aren’t incredible athletes. It isn’t even because they are smaller in some respects. Women lack the muscular coordination of men and therefore have a lower max power output.
With this in mind here are 5 things every woman can do to dominate the weight room:
1. Do more work between 80 – 100% of what you’re capable of. While men may work in this range for as little as 4 – 6 working sets (per major exercise) in a given 4 week training cycle women can stand to stay there quite a bit longer. It’s an important consideration because many programs are written following a common repetition continuum. For example 90%-95% intensity is largely understood to be a 3RM. Because women have less neuromuscular coordination their repetition continuum is different. A woman might be able to take 90- 95% for as many as 5 repetitions. Generally a 5RM is 87.5%. However, if you were to add 12.5% to the bar from 95% most women probably couldn’t even do one repetition. This displays the discrepancy in using the usual repetition continuum for female lifters.
2. Consider using techniques to work at above 100% of your capability. Doing so will help improve you neuromuscular coordination and teach your body to strain. Two examples are heavy eccentric work (spotter needed!) and involving exercises from a dead stop that allow you to concentrate and recruit maximally to apply force. For example: bottoms up squats, and pin presses.
3. Do extra technical or technique work. Working on your technique with submaximal weight and various drills can help you improve muscular coordination by perfecting your technique and timing. Like they say: Practice makes perfect. Taking the time to drill technique will have incredible transfer into your working sets. When things get real we revert back to our training.
4. Don’t change exercises so often. There are many ways to keep the body from adapting and exercise selection is only one of them. Often times the first thing we think to do when programming is change the exercise. Knowing that it will take female trainees longer to master a coordinated movement it makes more sense to use the following options to keep them from adapting: Intelligently vary loading, change the stimulus by using different bars, include slight variations on the exercise that increase and decrease range of motion and still keep the integrity of the movement.
For example: Squat –> Safety Bar Squat, GCB Squats, Front Squats, Bottoms Up Squats, Pause Squats
Deadlift –> Defecit Deadlift, Deadlift from Blocks, Rack Pulls, Even Trap Bar DL is a decent option
Bench –> Floor Press, Pin Press, Swiss Bar Bench Press, Bench Press to Boards
5. Prime the CNS. Here’s an excerpt from an article I recently wrote commenting on this:
Depending on the focus for that day’s training session, I always include an explosive movement to prime the nervous system. The central nervous system is responsible for sending the message to skeletal muscle to produce a desired movement.
Jumps, throws and sprints will help to improve your neuromuscular coordination. Improved neuromuscular coordination means that you will be better able to produce a coordinated firing of the muscles involved in the lift. Here is an example of appropriate programming:
Squatting → Warm up with Squat Jump→ Box Jump Variations
Bench/Overhead Pressing → Warm up with Medicine Ball Chest-Pass Variations
Deadlifting→ Warm up with Broad Jump, Sprint Variations, Box Jump Variations Doing Chin-ups → Warm up with Overhead Medicine Ball Slam
January has come and almost gone. How are you doing with your fitness goals? I hope you are achieving them. If you are not, it is never too late to start over again and with more resolve.
In the gym business, we usually see a flood of people come in the gym during the first few weeks of January and never see them again. Most gyms love this because they have them signed up on a contract. TPS is different. WE want you in here. If you are a newsletter reader far away, we want you in YOUR gym. We want to see you make progress. Are you doing that?
The point of this essay is not to guilt you into going to the gym, but to motivate you and to get you to self- reflect as to why you are not doing it.
If you are not hitting the gym at least twice a week, why? Do you think you don’t have the time? Do you stay away because you don’t know what to do, or didn’t get immediate results? Are you intimidated in the gym because there are people fitter or stronger than you? Do you not FEAR the consequences of not exercising?
I’ll touch on each of these, but first, I’ll talk about the consequences of not exercising. Inactivity leads to many problems, obesity (which leads to even more problems), lack of energy, difficulty sleeping, risk of injury (especially if you have a physical job-or worse, if you don’t) and many more issues.
Dr. Fred Hatfield used to tell this story at seminars to give the attendees a good analogy to give to their clients. He would ask us all if we brushed out teeth daily (some of you may have heard this before). Everyone answered yes. He then asked them why they did this. No one gave the answer he was looking for, although they gave excellent answers.
Fred would listen to all the answers and then yell loudly, WRONG! You brush your teeth because you FEAR the consequences of not brushing your teeth. This was brilliant. No one looked at it like this. He then went into an angry oratory of not fearing the consequences a lack of exercise and he listed many of the reasons I did above.
Without laying guilt on you, this should be your primary reason to exercise. If you don’t, your life will not be as healthy. Health is our greatest gift, just ask someone who doesn’t have it.
Having the simple ability to go through life feeling good, having normal blood pressure, being able to carry in the groceries without pain, being able to play with your kids or grandchildren are all taken for granted by many. Not exercising WILL catch up to you and it will not be fun.
Let’s look at some of the other reasons. You don’t have the time. Really? I bet you have the time to surf the web, go on Facebook for an hour, or watch too much TV. We all have the time; we just need to prioritize it. We have just added a bunch of FREE new 30 minute classes for those of you who “don’t have the time”. Taking 2 -30 minute classes a week is not the best fitness plan, but it is much better than doing nothing.
What about those of you that don’t know what to do? TPS offers FREE New Member Orientations designed just for you. IT’s FREE. Many other gyms also offer something like this. IF you don’t train here, find out if your gym offers something like this. Also if you don’t train here, why not, you should.
What about those that didn’t get immediate results? Our society has gravitated towards one where instant gratification is of primary importance. Sorry everyone, fitness does not happen overnight. You need to work at it. Make a point to give it 2 months of consistent exercise. You will make progress. What if you don’t make the progress that you wanted? Well, you need to analyze what you are doing. Where did you get your training plan from? Did you make it up yourself? Did you see it on TV? Are you doing nothing but cardio?
If you answered yes to any of these, I highly suggest you go to the Articles page and read the 5 Things That Don’t Work for Your Fitness Plan series. It answers all of these and more.
Are you intimidated in the gym because there are others there that are stronger, in better shape or you just don’t know what to do? Well, I have news for you. The people that are in better shape are like that for a reason. They work out, consistently as part of their lifestyle. Read our reviews on Yelp if you have not been upstairs in the weight room. They consistently say there are no attitudes here. We welcome everyone who wants to make a positive change in their fitness program, and we are helpful. Not just the staff, but the members. Don’t be afraid to try something new, at least not here at TPS. WE are committed to your health and fitness and we know that you all have to start somewhere. Take the boxing or Muay Thai intro classes and see if it is for you. Try the Group X classes, sign up for the New Member Orientation. All of these programs are offered with the beginner in mind. We will TEACH you what to do. We want you to succeed.
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