Nick Underwood

            “Ok how do I do this again, head and eyes straight forward, hips first, hips back, squeeze with my quads on the descent, arch my back, blah, blah, blah…..”  These are words we’ve all said or screamed to a team mate or ourselves.  It’s like a written recipe for the perfect competition squat.  It’s the best way to squat that will put your back in the best position and leverage all your muscles correctly to safely maximize the amount of weight we can lift.  Very intelligent men and women from Hatfield to Louie have helped us develop that perfect technique.  However it seems that we can’t ever get all the ingredients right cause every few years or so someone throws a new spice into the recipe that if we’d only been doing it all along we’d be much stronger.  Well crap!  Now here’s the real meat of the article, if the human body has been lifting and squatting for thousands of years if there was a perfect way to do it, don’t you think if we took away all the outside influences of our mind the body would naturally move in the most powerful and safe fashion it could?

            The best example of this is to watch a toddler squat down to grab something.  His back is perfectly straight his knees stay behind his toes and his shoulders are back.  Now is this because someone taught him to do this?  No, of course not.   The toddler is doing what comes natural to him.  Now if you are saying, “well that’s a bad example because children are more flexible.”  You are correct but that is precisely my point.  Our bodies are already wired to perform the most beautiful squat possible; our focus need not be on what we need to do to perform the perfect squat but what we need to stop doing in order to get back to the perfect squat.  See with a little practice even an engineer can form a good thesis!

            For this purposes of this article, let’s establish a few things that may not be common knowledge.  First – a lack of flexibility is not the muscle growing shorter, it is simply the body holding a muscle in a position, or preventing movement a certain direction due to a perceived danger.  This is true for all healthy joints.  Secondly, a muscle imbalance is due to the body compensating for a movement being preformed differently than the body was designed to do.  While this article is specifically talking about the squat, the classic argument against this is the gym rat that has knots in his back from only benching and never working his back.  This scenario is possible but the body does not like to be imbalanced so assuming the outside factors are removed even a small amount of back work would make the body super compensate, the knots in his back are likely from other reasons but that’s for another article.  Lastly, how you bend and move outside the gym in your daily life is going to have a much larger influence on your squat form than your “greasing the groove” warm up sets you do in front of the mirror.  Notice I did not say how you squat outside the gym, I said “bend and move,” this is important cause the things we do the most are sitting, standing, walking/running, and lying.

            Many of us have jobs that require long periods of sitting.  Standing up after four hours at the computer reminds you of how awful this can be for flexibility.  There is plenty out there about the correct way to sit, feet flat, knees below hips, ect ect, so I won’t repeat it here, but what I will do is examine how important following those tips is to your powerlifting performance.  Imagine a subject sit at a computer where the computer screen is below eye level.  Now when something small pops up they lean forward and down to see it.  If this is held long enough the muscles in the front of the neck, abs, quads and traps learn to hold themselves in a shorter position.  Now this is the new norm, the individual doesn’t even notice that they slouch forward bending at the middle back which in turn grows weaker because it does less work.  Not easy to hold a good arch in the squat with a weak middle back.  Also the individual has shortened their quads around the hip joint, so when they try to sit up again they extend their legs to relieve the tension.  This, if held long enough shortens the quads even further.  This leads to increased forward pelvic tilt, which isn’t always a bad thing but it has happened too quickly and the other muscle groups have not compensated. Now when the individual stands his lower back is not strong enough to compensate for the increased forward lean so he pulls his shoulders back.  This tucks his butt his gait becomes a pulling step instead of a pushing step.  And all because of a poor computer set up.  This of course is just one path that incorrect ergonomics can lead, many more problems can develop in many different ways.  The point is you must have posture awareness and correct movement patterns both in and out of the gym.

            Before wrapping up I want to dive into the need for correct standing posture since this is what has been at the root of my squatting problems for a long time and I think there are many out there suffering from it as well.  From early school years on we are taught to stand up straight and stick our chest out.  This is sold to us as the correct manly stance.  Manly or not human beings are not meant to stand this way.  Our pelvis has a slight tilt in it, our spine follows this tilt.  If we were meant to stand perfectly straight either the pelvis would parallel to the ground or our spine would exit at a backward angle.  The body is designed to transfer the force of its weight perfectly to ground through its skeleton.  This means the only part of your body that should feel your weight is your feet.  If you stand up and can feel force (not necessarily pain) in any part of your body that is not your feet it means you are standing in such a way that applies force a direction that is not along your skeleton.  Try shifting your weight around to focus this feeling of weight on your feet.  You’ll find that the position that does this best has you leaning slightly forward at the hips, shoulders relaxed and knees slightly bent.  This is the position you should stand in, any other position will develop a flexibility/firing pattern that is not the way you were designed to operate and not conducive to the perfect squat.

            Your legs are designed to push.  They are pulling muscles only in isolation movements which feel foreign the first time you try them.  But put them in a pushing motion and you have the power of your bodyweight in even the most novice athletes.  With this established I can make the statement that walking/running is designed to be a pushing motion.  Again this moves back to how an individual carries themselves while moving.  If our subject attempts to stand straight up and down while walking he’ll find that he heel of his forefoot strikes the ground way in front of his shoulder line.  To gain forward motion with this foot he must force the foot into the ground and pull with his hamstring.  His hind foot is behind him and bent at the knee, however because the other foot is so far in front of him his hind foot must support his weight with a knee that is bent way in front of the toe; bad news and within a few weeks painful.  Eventually this individual will develop a “toes out” duck walk since this movement pattern allows him to move forward by shifting his hips and avoid bending his knees which is now painful.  This will lead to flat feet, tight IT bands, and kneecap tracking issues (cracking knees).  In the gym he’ll notice his knees traveling outside of the shoulder, knee, toe, plane, and he will find a narrow stance squat to be almost impossible due to balance issues.  Of course this is a worst case scenario; conditions will likely differ from each individual. 

            The correct method of walking/running is for the individual to have a slightly forward lean just like in the correct standing posture.  This is not a very noticeable lean, but your shoulders should never get perceivably behind you lead heel at the point where the heel strikes the ground.  In a fast run your heel gets way ahead of shoulders while in the air so this is an important distinction.    At this point weight is transferred to your lead leg and it pushes you forward while the rear leg is thrown forward.  The faster you run the more time you will actually spend in the air so things become more complicated and they aren’t as important to this article.

            My intent in this article was not to give a lesson on ergonomics but to show you how important your daily life is to a complex movement like the squat.  If you read the article and thought “I just want to get a little stronger, and don’t want to change my whole life” you missed the point.  Correct movement patterns lead to a healthy active life, being able to sink a heavy squat without rounding your back is just a bonus.  If you disagreed with many of my points I encourage you to observe some different cultures for awhile.  A frequent saying in my gym was, “put on another plate, somewhere some 13 year old Asian girl is warming up with your max.”   Funny but also true.  Many cultures in Asia still use squat toilets, a glance down any street in India and you’ll find few chairs because the Indians have little trouble sitting on their ankles.  When was the last time you saw that in a western culture?  Who do you think has a higher rate of back and knee problems?

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