Starting Strength Notes
Width of the feet placement tightens the hip at the bottom of a squat and narrowness of the feet disables the adductors from stretching and prevents the body from making its full range of motion.
During partial squats the hamstrings are not allowed their full and natural stretch and the result is most of the stress against the tibia being upwards and forwards from the quadriceps producing an anterior shear, forward directed sliding force on the knee with the tibia being pulled forward from the patellar tendon and without a balancing pull from the hamstrings.
Overactive quads and weak/underdeveloped hamstrings play a huge roll in anterior cruciate ligament tears, a properly performed squat perfectly balances the muscular activity in the legs and puts the acl under no stress.
Another problem is that because of the shorter ROM and the excessive loading to the spine from putting too much weight on your back than your stabilizer maturity has developed to handle.
If your knees go too far back behind your toes, you have to lean far forward to stay in balance. Knees too far forward produces too acute of a knee angle, throwing your weight on your toes and making hip drive out of the bottom inefficient by loosening up the hamstrings.
Adductors can function when the kneees are out. If the knees are together, as when they point forward and the thighs get parallel to each other, the groin muscles are in a position where they are already shortened without having to lift any weight forcing the quads to do all of the work, while the adductors have contribued nothing to the movement.
The squat is not a leg press, and pushing the floor with
the feet provides an inadequate cue for the hamstrings, adductors, and glutes to provide their power out of the bottom. Hip extension is the first part of the upward drive out of the bottom. When you think about raising your butt up out of the bottom, the nervous system has a simple, efficient way to fire the correct motor units to initiate hip extension. If you are having trouble with this movement, it will help to have a coach or training partner push down on your sacrum from above while you are in the bottom position, and then drive up against the pressure. If you can do this in balance you are driving up correctly.
you want the hips and shoulders to rise at the same pace.
Sets of five are a good number to learn with, not so many that fatigue affects form during the last reps, and enough to establish and practice the technique while handling enough weight to get strong.Sets of five are a good number to learn with, not so many that fatigue affects form during the last reps, and enough to establish and practice the technique while handling enough weight to get strong. Squatting in front of a mirror is a really bad idea. Many weight rooms have mirrors on all the walls, making it impossible to squat without a mirror there, within eyesight, giving you its bad feedback. A mirror is a bad tool because it provides information about only one plane, the frontal, and depth cannot be judged by looking in the mirror from the front. Some obliqueness of angle is required to see the relationship between patella and hip crease, but a mirror set at an oblique angle would produce a twisting of the neck. Cervical rotation under a heavy bar is just as bad an idea as cervical hyperextension under a heavy bar. But the best reason not to use a mirror in front of any multijoint exercise is that you should be developing kinesthetic sense of movement by paying attention to all the sensory input provided by proprioception, rather than focusing merely on visual input from a mirror. "Learn to feel it, not just see it."
However, as the squat approaches the bottom position, the necessary forward lean of the trunk has a tendency to make the lower back assume a flexed, "rounded" position. This is due to the hamstring anatomy. As the squat depth increases and the torso assumes a more forward tilt, the bottom of the pelvis (the origin point of the hamstrings), locked into the rigid spine, tilts away from the back of the knee (the insertion point of the hamstrings). As these what you do with the hamstrings, along with the glutes and adductors. The drive out of the bottom is hip extension, and the more efficiently you use hamstrings, adductors, and glutes, the more hip drive you have. This is another reason why good depth is important: the deeper you can squat with good form, the more the hamstrings are stretched, and the longer they are when they begin to contract the longer they can produce force during the contraction.
Squatting power is generated by the hips and legs and is transmitted up the rigid trunk
segment to the load resting on the shoulders. The spinal column is held rigid in its normal
anatomical position by the muscles of the back, sides, ribs and abs, so that the force may be safely transmitted to the load through the trunk. These muscles contract isometrically — that is, they stay in contraction but cause no movement to occur, and in doing so they permit no movement to occur. The pelvis articulates with the spine in the L5/S1 area of the lower back, the area above the tailbone. The muscles of the lower back — the erector spinae group — insert on the pelvis and at numerous points along the spinal column, so that when these muscles are in contraction the pelvis remains in a constant position relative to the lumbar vertebrae. The erector spinae serve to lock the pelvis and the lower back together, to fuse the pelvis and spine into a rigid structure, to protect the vertebral column from movement under load and to hold all these joints in normal anatomical position when lifting heavy loads so that the intervertebral discs are not damaged. These muscles, along with several ligaments and other connective tissue, act to keep the lower back in extension under a load. This area needs to stay "arched" to stay safe when lifiting. And this is why the pelvis tilts forward at the same angle as the lower back as we lean forward with the back locked in a safe extended position.
Tight hamstrings cause most back position problems. A deterioration in kyphotic extension precedes the deterioration in lordotic extension, culminating in a round back at the bottom. This is due to the lack of extensibility in the hamstrings and the resultant ability to maintain a good pelvic tilt at depth, and the false perception of depth created by lowering just the bar.
The "Cat box position," a result of tight hamstrings. Knee and hip extension are limited by hamstring extensibility and the bar is then lowered by spinal flexion. This is an excellent way to produce a back injury.
Muscles reach the limit of their ability to stretch, they become tighter and begin to exert more pull on both the knee and their pelvic attachment. Merc is the source of the lower back problem: your back muscles attach at the top of your pelvis, and your hamstrings attach to the bottom. If your hamstrings lack sufficient extensibility, they will exert enough tension on the bottom of your pelvis to pull it out of its locked position in the lower back, breaking muscular tension in the erector spinae, and permitting your entire lower back to come out of extension into a "round" position. The back muscles and the hamstrings are competing for control of your pelvis, and the back
Merc is the source of the lower back problem: your back muscles attach at the top of your pelvis, and your hamstrings attach to the bottom. If your hamstrings lack sufficient extensibility, they will exert enough tension on the bottom of your pelvis to pull it out of its locked position in the lower back, breaking muscular tension in the erector spinae, and permitting your entire lower back to come out of extension into a "round" position.The back muscles and the hamstrings are competing for control of your pelvis, and the back muscles must win if your spine is to stay safe.
Your best power is achieved when your hips continue straight up out of the bottom, your tibias serving as anchors for your hamstrings, your hamstrings and adductors contracting against the pelvis to produce hip extension, your quads then producing knee extension and then your knees and hips locking out simultaneously at the top.
Driving chest up instead of hips up kills hamstring power in the middle of the squat.
Raising the chest pulls the knees forward, and when the knee angle closes the hamstring shortens. Any muscle that assumes a position of contraction without moving a
load during that contraction has not actively contributed to that movement. This phenomenon will be observed often throughout this examination of barbell training.
Remember: the pelvis is locked in position — in line with the spine — by the low back muscles, the hamstrings attach to the ischial tuberosity at the bottom of the pelvis, and the pelvis tilts forward with the torso as squat depth increases, thus stretching out the hamstrings and glutes.
The bounce at the b o t t om of the squat is merely the correct use of the stretch reflex — a muscle contraction enhanced by the proprioceptive detection of muscle elongation immediately prior to the contraction — inherent in any dynamic muscle contraction, added to the rebound provided by the viscoelastic energy stored in the stretched muscles and tendons.
The correct bottom position of the squat stretches the hamstrings and adductors, and the drive up utilizes that stretch. The contraction is evident as the muscles shorten during the ascent. The "bounce" is the stretch-shortening cycle applied to the elastic rebound that tight, stretched muscles and tendons provide at the bottom of the squat.
The problem with knees too far forward is not that it destroys the knees, but that it
has a detrimental effect on hip extension out of the bottom. A knees-forward position produces a more acute knee angle, and the resultant shortened hamstrings have less room to contract from the other end. This makes the already-contracted hamstring's contribution to hip extension much less efficient than a longer, stretched-out hamstring's would be.
