If you’re serious about your training, I hope you took my recent tips about squatting to heart.
They’re not called the ‘King’ of exercises for nothing.
There’s a lot of contradictory advice out there about this exercise. If you spend anytime reading it, you’re likely to end up confused and give up on it…
Don’t let that happen to you…
One of the biggest points of conflict and confusion has to do with squatting depth. (don’t think conflict’s too strong of a word. Some are literally glad to take up arms over this)
Some say don’t go lower than ‘parallel,’ others say all the way down, until your butt touches ankles, aka ‘a.ss to the grass’
Some say going to parallel is all you need. Others say if it ain’t all the way down, it’s a partial squat.
As if that wasn’t confusing enough, each style has its critics, claiming potential injury if you don’t follow their preferred method.
In order to help clear up the confusion, we need to go back to the origins of these two styles.
The style that has you tickling your heiney with blades of grass comes from Olympic Weight Lifting.
On limit lifts in the snatch and clean, the athlete is usually only able to get the bar up to about navel height.
In order to complete the lift, he has to ‘squat under the bar.’
As the weight gets heavier, the lifter can’t lift the bar as high, so he’s ‘forced’ to ‘squat udder’ lower and lower to complete it.
So the lower the lifter can get under the bar, the heavier the weight he’ll able snatch or clean.
The lowest a person can get while maintaining proper form is ‘butt touching ankles or the ground…
I guess if someone had a really bony butt, they could literally drive it down in to the ground like a spike. But the how the heck is he going to get free and complete the lift?
Since Olympic weightlifters go for max weights in competitions, they find themselves in the absolute bottom position of the squat often.
To make sure they have enough strength to get out of the ’pocket,’ they train their squats in a full range of motion.
If you pay attention to how Olympic lifters train, you’ll notice that they usually use low reps.
This is an important point to keep in mind, and I’ll touch on it the next.
I’ll also go over the parallel squat.
See you then…
Train Smart, Train Hard
Ray Toulany
PS: There’s one thing that a certainty when you squat hard, a BIG appetite. To make sure you’re putting the right things in your stomach to get the most from your squatting…
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