Starting Strength

with this extreme hips-back position. This exaggeration is needed because you’re going to stop dead, with no rebound, and then drive your hips up from the pause below parallel. The difference in stance reflects the need to tighten up the bottom position for an exaggerated hip drive without a rebound.
    As you approach the box, slow down so that you don’t slap it with your butt. The purpose here is to load the box carefully to avoid compressing your back. Pause for a second or two and drive the hips straight up hard. Do not exhale at the bottom. Air is support, and if ever in your life you need support, it will be at the bottom of a box squat. This exercise can be used for varying numbers of reps and sets, depending on the effect desired. The box can be varied in height from several inches below parallel to an inch or two, no more , above parallel. The deep versions use lighter weights, as mentioned earlier, and the high-box version can be done with weights greatly exceeding a 1RM squat. (This alone should indicate how important it is to squat below parallel; high squats are much easier to do with lots more weight because they are not a full-range-of-motion exercise, and yes, a couple of inches does make this much difference.)
    A version of this exercise known as the “rocking box squat” (developed at Westside Barbell in Culver City, California, in the 1960s) has the weight leaving the feet briefly as you rock back slightly and then coming back onto the feet before you drive your hips up hard off the box. But keep this in mind: box squats are an advanced exercise with a huge potential for injury if done by inexperienced or physically unprepared trainees. The risk of spinal compression between the box and the bar is very high, and high school coaches should know better than to allow it. Please do not do them if you are not prepared, and this statement most definitely constitutes a disclaimer.
     
    Partial squats inside the rack. The other way to do partial squats is inside the power rack with the pins set at a height that produces the desired depth when the bar on your back touches the pins at the bottom. There are, fascinatingly enough, two ways to do these. The easy way is to set the pins at the desired depth, set up the hooks inside the rack, take the bar out of the hooks, squat down to a dead stop on the pins, and then come up. This method permits you to get tight and store some elastic energy on the way down to the bottom even without a bounce, preserving the effects of the eccentric and concentric order of things. The hard way is to load the bar on the pins at the desired bottom position, squat down under it and get in position to squat at the bottom, and then squat the bar up from what is most assuredly a very dead stop. This method is really a challenge at the lower reaches of depth and is hard with even light weights. As with box squats, they get easy at rack heights much above parallel, with so much quadriceps and so little posterior muscle involved that they become good only for producing sore knees.

    Figure 7-5. Two ways to do squats in the rack. (A) The top start allows the eccentric contraction to assist the concentric phase even in the absence of a stretch reflex, and it can be used with much heavier weights. (B) The bottom start, with the bar resting on the rack pins, requires that the concentric contraction be started from a dead stop in the hardest position of the movement, greatly increasing the difficulty and decreasing the weight that can be used.

    Bouncing the bar off of the pins substitutes for the rebound that your hamstrings and adductors should be providing, thus defeating the purpose of doing the exercise in the rack. The bar should be lowered to the pins, fully stopped, and then driven up. The dead stop from the pins provides the same opportunity to work initial explosion out of the hole that box squats do, without the risk of any spinal entrapment compression. It is easier to get tighter at the bottom if you have had the whole trip down to the box or the pins to do it; it is hard to get in an efficient position to squat if you have to do it while wadded up at the bottom, unable to stretch down into the bottom from the correct position assumed at the top. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method, but by the time you’re ready to do partial squats, you’ll have a feel for which one will work best for you. Just remember: this type of squat training is not for novice