Starting Strength

squat.

The Important Things You’re Going to Do Wrong
     
    Depth: You’re probably going to squat to a position above parallel. This will occur because you’re not looking down, you’re not shoving your knees out, you have a stance that is either too narrow or too wide, or you have not committed to going deep.

    Knee position: You will fail to shove your knees out as you start down. This will make correct depth hard to attain and will kill your hip drive.

    Stance: Your stance will be either too narrow or too wide, with your toes usually pointed too forward. This will result in a squat that is not below parallel.

    Eye gaze: You will fail to look down. This will kill your hip drive.

    Back angle: Your back will (usually) be too vertical, due to a faulty mental picture of what your hips do when you squat or due to the incorrect placement of the bar on your back, or your back will be too horizontal, due to your failure to keep your chest up. Either error will adversely affect hip drive and depth.

    Hip drive: You will lift your chest instead of driving your hips up. This will kill your power out of the bottom by making your back angle too vertical.

    Bar placement: You will place the bar too high on your back. This will adversely affect your back angle and your hip drive.

    Rack height: You will set the bar in the rack in a position that is too high. This will make the preferred position on the back difficult to attain.

    Notice that all of these problems are extremely interrelated. The squat is a complex, multi-joint exercise whose correct execution depends on all the components of the entire system functioning together. An incorrect placement of any component will perturb the entire system to its detriment. A working knowledge of the functional mechanics of the system is important if you are to understand the contribution of each component to the system, and the workings of the system as a whole.
     

    Figure 2-24. Don’t do this, you fool.

    Leverage and Moment – The Basis of Barbell Training
     
    If the system of barbell training you are about to study is to be more than just another collection of opinions about the subject, it must proceed from more than just the history of the activity, the preferences of the author, and the observed habits of those people who happen to be performing at a high level. History is filled with examples of less-than-efficient behavior that is nonetheless effective; personal preferences quite often reflect an unquenchable bias; people are often good at things without knowing exactly why, and these folks might be even better at them if they did. It seems likely that barbell training would be more efficiently performed if it had more in common with engineering than with astrology – more like physics class than birthday party – and it would be more effectively coached if it were developed from mechanics rather than from folklore.
    An understanding of the forces affecting the lifter and the barbell is essential to forming an accurate analysis of the movements used in barbell training. The squat, bench press, deadlift, press, and power clean are potentially complicated multi-joint exercises that form the basic movements employed in barbell training. The complexity of these movements is mitigated by the fact that they are all quite natural expressions of loaded human movement – the ways that the skeletal system translates the force of muscle contraction into movement as the body interacts with its environment. But if these natural movements are to effectively and efficiently function as exercises, they must be tailored to specifically cause the use of the most muscle mass over the longest range of motion so that the most weight can be lifted and thus produce the most effective strength adaptation.
    If we develop an accurate description of each exercise based on an understanding of what each one is supposed to accomplish in terms of movement against a loaded bar, how this movement is most efficiently accomplished using muscular contractile force translated through the skeletal components that transfer the force to the load, and which physical adaptations will accompany an ability to handle increasing loads in each particular movement pattern, we will have what can be described as a model of the exercise.
    This model must be grounded in an understanding of the principles that govern the motions within a physical system. And a grasp of each model makes the performance and coaching