by Mike Robertson
It pains me to see ugly squats. Seriously. Physical pain, nausea, and nervous ticks all occur when I see the average gym goer hit the iron and try to squat.
The only thing I can imagine being worse are the clowns who still hang out in the Smith machine so they can "hit their glutes and hams harder."
A few weeks ago, Eric Cressey wrote an article titled The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Benchers, and it was fantastic. So yes, this is blatant plagiarism at its finest. (Plagiarism between Eric and me is fine, though, because for the first two years we wrote for TMUSCLE, everyone thought we were the same person anyway!)
Most importantly, however, his article got me thinking about my favorite lift, the squat.
As I've espoused in earlier articles, I'm definitely not the world's greatest squatter. But for someone with long legs and a short torso, but a will to squat more weight, I've done alright for myself. And hopefully over the course of this article, I'm going to help you take your squat to the next level as well.
Here are my top five habits of defective squatters. Learn or be crushed.
Losing your lower back arch in the hole of a squat is a surefire way to not only lower your training poundages, but to put your body at increased risk of injury as well.
When you lose your neutral spine position, you not only stretch the posterior ligaments that support your spine, but you lose the ability of the deep spinal erectors to produce a posterior shear force. In layman's terms, you increase the likelihood of spraining a ligament or herniating a disc in your back, neither of which sounds like a whole lot of fun!
While many think that some simple hamstring stretching is all it takes to rectify the problem, that's a pretty rudimentary way to look at it. What you have is a stiffness imbalance between your hips and your lower back.
"Stiffness" is a fancy way of saying relative flexibility. In this case, the muscles that surround your hips are less flexible than the muscles that surround your lumbar spine. When you move into deep hip flexion (i.e. a squat) and the muscles of your hips are stiffer than your lumbar spine, you're forced into lumbar flexion instead. If you want to fix this, you have to balance the stiffness.
Will old-school static stretching help? To some degree, sure. However, that's only one part of the equation. Instead of just working on the hips, why not focus on fixing the hips, the lumbar spine, and the motor pattern all at the same time?
This is what I described to some degree in the Mythbusters Vol 3 article. Foam rolling combined with dynamic and static flexibility work for all the muscles supporting the hips is important. Couple that with some serious core training (which I'll discuss later), and you'll be well on your way to success.
Finally, maintaining a neutral spine will lead to more hip recruitment and a better transfer of energy to the bar. Not only will you be safer, but you'll be moving more weight to boot.
Solution: Squat to a high box.
Beyond the remedial hip and lumbar spine work, you'll need to couple that with squat training that works within your functional range. This is the range of motion that you can squat without losing the arch in your lower back. This will vary depending on the type of squat you're performing (front squat, back squat, safety bar squat, etc.).
In this case, squat to a box that's just above the point where you'd lose your arch. Over the course of a couple weeks, continue to lower the box until you're squatting to a depth you're comfortable with.
