Starting Strength

the floor, put your hands behind your head, lift your elbows, and raise your chest up off of the floor. This is how it feels to produce a thoracic, or upper back, extension. We want to train the lower back, so lie back down, straighten your knees, and then lift your knees up off the floor. To increase the sensation, try to get your quads off the floor, too. (Don’t push your toes down into the floor to lift the knees up.) When you do this movement correctly, you’ll be using your glutes, your hamstrings, and most important, your lower back muscles. This is how it feels to have your lower back in contraction. Feel this arch. Relax and do it again. By placing your back in a position where you have to contract your spinal erectors repeatedly, without trying to do anything else at the same time, you can embed this new movement pattern quickly and easily, without having to try to distinguish it from the other elements within an unfamiliar movement. A set of 10–15 reps causes a burn in these muscles, and when you stand up, you can feel the muscles quite well, the movement pattern is fresh on the mind, and you can then duplicate the movement that caused the burn.

    Figure 2-39. Top to bottom , The progression from identifying the lower-back arch while lying on the ground, the same arch while standing, the same arch as the bottom position is assumed, and the arch at the start position of the pull.

    Assume this arched position again immediately while standing, and repeat it several times. Now, just to be sure, unlock your knees and hips to about a half-squat position and see if you can still perform this lumbar extension. Since you can now identify the correct back position, you should be able to keep your back arched through the whole squat if you keep your knees out of the way.
     
    Hips
     
    The squat is an important exercise because of the intricate interplay between the skeletal and muscular components of the kinetic chain of the movement. The feet against the floor, the lower legs, the thighs, the hips, and the spine supporting the bar are woven together and controlled by a web of anterior and posterior muscles and connective tissues that continually adjust their positions relative to the balance point over the mid-foot. Several of these muscular components – the gastrocs, the hamstrings, and the rectus femoris – cross two joints. The roles of these muscles are especially complex, as they operate against both proximal and distal attachments at the same time, providing the fine adjustments necessary for the production of force in the context of balance.
    “Hip drive” is the term used for this complex interplay as it relates to the pelvis. The hips provide the power out of the bottom as the glutes, adductors, and hamstrings start opening the hip angle. As you rise above parallel, the quads assume a larger role in the upward drive as the hamstrings anchor the back angle. At the top, the glutes, adductors, hamstrings, and quads finish their simultaneous extension of the hips and knees.
    Knees and hips are tied together conceptually, as well as by the femurs. If your knees are too far forward, your hips are, too. And if your hips are too far forward and your knees are too far forward, either you are off-balance forward or your back angle is too vertical, the hip angle is too open, the knee angle is too closed, and you can’t drive up out of the bottom. Hip drive is the basis for squatting power, and even though it is anatomically complex, hip drive can be learned easily and quickly.
    Look carefully at Figure 2-40 . As you assume the bottom position, imagine a hand placed on your sacrum, right at the base of the spine, and imagine pushing this hand straight up in the air with your butt. This is as clear a picture of the process of driving the hips up as can be drawn. If you have a training partner, revisit the hip drive lesson from the first part of the chapter: get him to place his hand as shown in the picture and provide some resistance to your hip drive so that you can feel the effect. (This is also a good time to refresh your head/eye-position lesson. Look both down and up at the ceiling while driving against the hand, and see which direction you prefer. Twenty bucks says it’s down.) There is only a subtle difference in appearance between good strong hip drive and a squat that lacks this, but you will be able to feel the power of this technique the first time you do it correctly.

    Figure 2-40. Learning hip