I spent about a year trying to get my squat to be a nice upright weightlifter squat and my squat stayed stagnant for a year. As soon as I realised, "I'm not a weightlifter, I just wanna lift the heavy thing" and let myself lean a little bit to more leg press a squat than hack squat a squat, my weight went up from 200 to 220kg. I'm not an excellent squatter but I'm content with where it is and really dont need to be able to squat more than that for my goals at the moment which are all strongman goals and not weightlifting.
Month ago I finally fixed my heels lifting from ground, after many years of thinking it was a mobility issue. I did it just with focusing on not letting them lift xD god I felt stupid. So you are very correct with this.
I went into my heavy ish 5x5 yesterday after watching this video. I've had the issue of my bar path deviating forward (more than acceptable) to the point where my heels are on the verge of lifting off the floor. I did not feel particularly strong on the day, but decided to put all my emphasis into keeping a rigid mid and upper back. Lo and behold, best bar path I've had in years. Suddenly, I felt the strongest when over my midfood, as opposed to feeling stronger when going out over the toes. Thanks Sika!
An analysis on the french low bar with why it works for them but why its not the best idea for everyone else would be great lads! Also clip references were on point in this one 😂. Cheers
i think it work for them because its like hitting two bird with one stone, a lot of French goodmorning low bar squatter has tremendous numbers on their Deadlift, by doing squat this way it strengthen their posterior muscle such as the hip flexor and the glutes to an extend it will develop the muscle needed for more heavier deadlift sesh
The back section has been a life long study for me. I have experiementing with vertical vs the ribs down slight pelvic tilt i do feel more strurdy with the ribs down method. Both are pretty comfortable though. Good info fellas.
Honestly, the best squat form I have learned is the starting strength model. It requires that you lean over point the chest down , set the knees out early, reach the hips back and then drive up with the hips. As a 6ft 3 guy I used to let my knees slide forward too much and got bad knee tendinitis. Now that's disappeared and I feel the posterior chain more involved. A complete game changer and feels more natural this way to me. I'm also able to keep the bar directly over midfoot better and feel in better balance when squatting. Whereas before I was trying to squat like a Chinese weightlifter and it just didn't seem to work well for me.
Chinese style squatting is not meant for 6'3 people lol I eventually settled on cues similar to what you described. Main cue is knees start moving forward a split second before hips move back, then when hips are moving knee stays stable over toes.
Im quite a dominant deadlifter, and this tended to make my squat turn into a good morning. I would say adding in SSB work regularly as a secondary squat exercise made a huge difference - it taught me to use my upper back earlier in the squat and more consistently, and has really helped turning into good mornings.
Squat the way that feels normal for you and stop obsessing about form. Anatomy is different for everyone and the body will strive to find the position that is strongest to you. People with long femurs tend to bend forward alot to be able to get to depth, it's ok.
Since you used him as an example. Contact Layne Norton and “fix” his squat. He worked with McGill awhile back. You would have thought the spine guru should have fixed it for him.
You mentioned something about all but the largest lowbar squatters using heels, did you mean huge weights or a physically big lifter? I'm still very weak but also big and fat (202cm/~190+kg), testing out heels or no heels in my lowbar squat (130kg for 5), trying to fix my good morning tendencies, bar path, bar instability, and driving from my quads. Spent a long time fixing my bigger problems from years of inactivity, long way to go yet.
The section of the team physio explainin the posture was a bit weird. I mean in terms that we're explaining human anatomy in motion with a 2D stick figure that has straight lines as bodyparts. While the human spine has a strong S shape when it's neutral. And lifters like Tian Tao having massive back muscles, the traps and all of them making it rather difficult to gauge the shapes of the spine. Like if you bring your elbows back and open your chest, your back starts to look curved right away if you have big muscles. And accompany that with the curvature of the lower back and it starts to be rather difficult to gauge where the neutral and extension lies. And there's never footage directly from the side to try and draw a straight line from hip to neck and shape the potential spine shape. I'm not trying to say he's saying something wrong. He explained the concept very well, I think he addressed most of my points directly. I'm trying to say it feels like a very vague topic and tough to verify as a viewer with the limited material. All I know that if you avoid extension at all costs and overthink neutral spine, you'll quickly find yourself with rounded back, collapsing forward because you lost the rigidity. And to be fair, neutral has to be a range and we should have some sort of definition for it before we start talking about it in a critical way and comparing the directions coaches give, to be on the same track. It's rather unlikely that the spine is like a steel rod or beam all the way throughout the motion, we have the ideas of being relaxed and tensioned and then we have the ideas of extension and flexion and neutral between them, which is not a differential microscopic dot, obviously. I guess my conclusion from it all would be that neutral has to be defined as a range where at some point the extension starts to inhibit performance, but until then it's mostly just making the torso rigid. This was a great general instructions video for squatting in my opinion. I think a lot of people can feel a good squat and naturally gravitate towards that if they aren't too focused on directions they have understood wrong (I started squatting with huge extension thinking that's how you'll be upright and tight when I didn't have the strength to stay very upright) and have a couple of basic directions in place. Like try to get from this position to that position without looking like some sort of joker in a box spring toy.
My problem is I tend too good morning the concentric phase, as you describe in the hip drive chapter of your video. I go down upright, then initiate the eccentric with my hips.
I have a question I'm running becoming the horse 2 program. Some of the exercises don't have descriptions. On week three there's an exercise named 3 and I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean
Maybe you could demo this with a client on the more extreme side of the proportions scale? I've tried a lot of the tips in the video as a long femur short torso lifter and an upright deep squat still feels like a distant dream
I’m with you. My proportions aren’t so bad I think, though taller. I’ve learned to love front squats for depth and more quad development to supplement my low bar which feels totally natural to me. I think if you aren’t an Olympic weightlifter then forget worrying about it.
Squat morning often is the result of weak quads and not enough forward knee travel (think knees forward, shoulders back). But proportions and hip morphology matter a lot: asian weightlifters with long torso and short legs will have a natural upright position purely due to limb proportions.
I feel like I Squat rather upright however the lower back seems to be what I feel the most when I Squat (I do high bar, and I think quads! As I descend) - I think I am a natural good morning squatter so it's been some time that I've been trying to be more quad dominant. Would core and/or upper back work be something worth considering?
Of course a neutral spine would include a bit of curvature with the thoracic spine which is much more appropriate for the deadlift than it is for the squat
i don’t know why, but squats have always come naturally for me, like all the other lifts are weird and hard for me to understand, but i understand squats like nothing else.
Awesome video, but that belt squat stock footage really doesn't drive your point home given the woman is literally squatting with a negative shin angle lol. That being said, do you disagree that, at some point a person's femurs are so long compared to their upper body that they just can not avoid a good morning squat? The bar has to be in the center of gravity even for us lanky dudes unfortunately, and there comes a point with ankle mobility where more will get you more upright, but at a cost of a weaker position. Layne Norton is a great example of this. Dude's all legs, he'd have to touch his knees to the ground to dorsiflex enough to make up for that ridiculous femur length.
Honestly, we haven't met or helped that person yet. They MAY be out there but we haven't seen them. It might need some work but no ones squat is unfixable
Matt vena:"if you good morning a squat its because your body is telling you its more efficient. If youre an only lifter only good morning woth the angle you can still dona clean with"
Showing a bunch of clips of world level weightlifters isn't exactly the best choice for a video about how to correct a squat-morning pattern. Let's face it, almost every weightlifter at the world stage have proportions that make an upright squat comparatively easy. Examples of people like Zack Telander are far more instructional for the average Joe who is probably going to have to commit to a lot of forward lean early in the squat.
Definitely not true, it took me two years but I have a upright torso when I squat now. I have long femurs. Everything stayed helped a lot, also just front squat more, forces you to be in a upright position 😅
It's funny in the thumbnail for this video you show a guy doing a low bar squat. But yet in talking about this issue you only ever talk about and show people doing high bar squats. Well in the low bar squat there's going to be forward lean, yeah, maybe not as excessively as like a good morning but maybe like even a 45° angle.
torso angle is meaningless really. the bar is going to find it's way over the mid foot no matter what. so if you have long femurs and tight ankles, you will have a good morning squat period. dorsiflexion or heel elevation is the only thing that can save long femur individuals, and usually the heel elevation from weightlifting shoes isn't enough. also ankle mobility isn't improvable in most individuals, you've got what you've got plus or minus maybe a centimeter
Pushing knees out to the side is also an option for some lifters with long femurs. This “shortens” the femur in the front to back direction. This works in terms of physics, but not always in terms of anatomy as some people have very deep hip sockets.
I spent about a year trying to get my squat to be a nice upright weightlifter squat and my squat stayed stagnant for a year. As soon as I realised, "I'm not a weightlifter, I just wanna lift the heavy thing" and let myself lean a little bit to more leg press a squat than hack squat a squat, my weight went up from 200 to 220kg. I'm not an excellent squatter but I'm content with where it is and really dont need to be able to squat more than that for my goals at the moment which are all strongman goals and not weightlifting.
w squat tho
Month ago I finally fixed my heels lifting from ground, after many years of thinking it was a mobility issue. I did it just with focusing on not letting them lift xD god I felt stupid. So you are very correct with this.
Very common mistake 😊
I went into my heavy ish 5x5 yesterday after watching this video. I've had the issue of my bar path deviating forward (more than acceptable) to the point where my heels are on the verge of lifting off the floor. I did not feel particularly strong on the day, but decided to put all my emphasis into keeping a rigid mid and upper back. Lo and behold, best bar path I've had in years. Suddenly, I felt the strongest when over my midfood, as opposed to feeling stronger when going out over the toes. Thanks Sika!
I have just started squatting for the first time in YEARS. This came at the perfect time. Thanks boys!
Best of luck with it!
@@sikastrength should he consider using the sika strength app and the road to anywhere squat 2.0 program?
suggesting a video like this for knees caving in
Great idea! 👍
E3 Rehab has a really good video on knee valgus (knee cave)
An analysis on the french low bar with why it works for them but why its not the best idea for everyone else would be great lads! Also clip references were on point in this one 😂. Cheers
It would be unwatchable due to the ugliness of the technique
it work in powerlifting because it engages more hip flexors that are strong muscle
i think it work for them because its like hitting two bird with one stone, a lot of French goodmorning low bar squatter has tremendous numbers on their Deadlift, by doing squat this way it strengthen their posterior muscle such as the hip flexor and the glutes to an extend it will develop the muscle needed for more heavier deadlift sesh
The back section has been a life long study for me. I have experiementing with vertical vs the ribs down slight pelvic tilt i do feel more strurdy with the ribs down method. Both are pretty comfortable though. Good info fellas.
Honestly, the best squat form I have learned is the starting strength model. It requires that you lean over point the chest down , set the knees out early, reach the hips back and then drive up with the hips. As a 6ft 3 guy I used to let my knees slide forward too much and got bad knee tendinitis. Now that's disappeared and I feel the posterior chain more involved. A complete game changer and feels more natural this way to me. I'm also able to keep the bar directly over midfoot better and feel in better balance when squatting. Whereas before I was trying to squat like a Chinese weightlifter and it just didn't seem to work well for me.
I'm 6'3 too and had the same experience. But now even high bar squats feel good after finishing my lp. The mechanics are mostly the same.
I can relate.
Chinese style squatting is not meant for 6'3 people lol
I eventually settled on cues similar to what you described. Main cue is knees start moving forward a split second before hips move back, then when hips are moving knee stays stable over toes.
Long femur gang
Im quite a dominant deadlifter, and this tended to make my squat turn into a good morning. I would say adding in SSB work regularly as a secondary squat exercise made a huge difference - it taught me to use my upper back earlier in the squat and more consistently, and has really helped turning into good mornings.
Can attest to improved hip and ankle mobility help in staying more upright and quad focused. Great video as usual
LMAO THE SQUAT U POPUP ON THE FEET FRAME
For the record Alex takes creative liberties 😅
The Squat U pop up was CLASSIC 🤣
Edits went extremely hard in this video
Squat the way that feels normal for you and stop obsessing about form. Anatomy is different for everyone and the body will strive to find the position that is strongest to you. People with long femurs tend to bend forward alot to be able to get to depth, it's ok.
thanks a million for the great content today and the steph introduction
Excellent content 🔥
As someone with objectively dog ass proportions, I’ve come to the conclusion that most people think they have dog ass proportions.
Very informative, thank you.
Excellent video - can you get lifting shoes that light up and make a triumphant noise when your squat form is perfect?
Great video 🙌
The game within the game!! 11:00 i love this
Hmm never thought of monitoring my knees out of the hole. Will check this out for sure next time i squat
I love kang squats as well as standing good mornings but yes they are definitely to remain separate from low bar back squats
Lots of eastern European countries like the kang squat in weightlifting
I needed this video since this happens every time I max out and I don't like it.
Really great video guys
A video like this for addressing butt wink would be great.
Since you used him as an example. Contact Layne Norton and “fix” his squat. He worked with McGill awhile back. You would have thought the spine guru should have fixed it for him.
Great as always!
You mentioned something about all but the largest lowbar squatters using heels, did you mean huge weights or a physically big lifter? I'm still very weak but also big and fat (202cm/~190+kg), testing out heels or no heels in my lowbar squat (130kg for 5), trying to fix my good morning tendencies, bar path, bar instability, and driving from my quads. Spent a long time fixing my bigger problems from years of inactivity, long way to go yet.
How does this improve my bench press?
Very informative
The section of the team physio explainin the posture was a bit weird. I mean in terms that we're explaining human anatomy in motion with a 2D stick figure that has straight lines as bodyparts. While the human spine has a strong S shape when it's neutral. And lifters like Tian Tao having massive back muscles, the traps and all of them making it rather difficult to gauge the shapes of the spine. Like if you bring your elbows back and open your chest, your back starts to look curved right away if you have big muscles. And accompany that with the curvature of the lower back and it starts to be rather difficult to gauge where the neutral and extension lies. And there's never footage directly from the side to try and draw a straight line from hip to neck and shape the potential spine shape.
I'm not trying to say he's saying something wrong. He explained the concept very well, I think he addressed most of my points directly. I'm trying to say it feels like a very vague topic and tough to verify as a viewer with the limited material. All I know that if you avoid extension at all costs and overthink neutral spine, you'll quickly find yourself with rounded back, collapsing forward because you lost the rigidity. And to be fair, neutral has to be a range and we should have some sort of definition for it before we start talking about it in a critical way and comparing the directions coaches give, to be on the same track. It's rather unlikely that the spine is like a steel rod or beam all the way throughout the motion, we have the ideas of being relaxed and tensioned and then we have the ideas of extension and flexion and neutral between them, which is not a differential microscopic dot, obviously. I guess my conclusion from it all would be that neutral has to be defined as a range where at some point the extension starts to inhibit performance, but until then it's mostly just making the torso rigid.
This was a great general instructions video for squatting in my opinion. I think a lot of people can feel a good squat and naturally gravitate towards that if they aren't too focused on directions they have understood wrong (I started squatting with huge extension thinking that's how you'll be upright and tight when I didn't have the strength to stay very upright) and have a couple of basic directions in place. Like try to get from this position to that position without looking like some sort of joker in a box spring toy.
Mitchell Hooper going to watch this one.
My problem is I tend too good morning the concentric phase, as you describe in the hip drive chapter of your video. I go down upright, then initiate the eccentric with my hips.
I have a question I'm running becoming the horse 2 program. Some of the exercises don't have descriptions. On week three there's an exercise named 3 and I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean
What about the case where the knees come in when extending below parallel causing the hips to move back and often tipping the back?
Maybe you could demo this with a client on the more extreme side of the proportions scale? I've tried a lot of the tips in the video as a long femur short torso lifter and an upright deep squat still feels like a distant dream
I’m with you. My proportions aren’t so bad I think, though taller. I’ve learned to love front squats for depth and more quad development to supplement my low bar which feels totally natural to me. I think if you aren’t an Olympic weightlifter then forget worrying about it.
Squat morning often is the result of weak quads and not enough forward knee travel (think knees forward, shoulders back).
But proportions and hip morphology matter a lot: asian weightlifters with long torso and short legs will have a natural upright position purely due to limb proportions.
Sick to see a baldomniman spotting on a sika video
Can you show some lifters with different proportions? Long limbed/lanky people especially.
layne norton has a good morning squat and he defends it so hard 🤣🤣
Great video! Really useful info and fun clips. :D
I feel like I Squat rather upright however the lower back seems to be what I feel the most when I Squat (I do high bar, and I think quads! As I descend) - I think I am a natural good morning squatter so it's been some time that I've been trying to be more quad dominant.
Would core and/or upper back work be something worth considering?
@thepanash Ca serait pas ta pomme sur la vignette ?
Have yall heard of the Kang Squat? Supposedly mimics the second phase of the clean pull
Of course a neutral spine would include a bit of curvature with the thoracic spine which is much more appropriate for the deadlift than it is for the squat
So what you're saying is be a powerlifter and not worry about it?
Essentially bulk to 200kg
That's the only correct answer
@@RodolfoGeriatra just lowbar low enough and they all look like that
Pana in the thumbnail hahaha
He's a great lifter! ❤
Please tell us there's another video on the way that'll feature that drawing Stephane had of butt wink
@13:50 Tian making that 290 look comfortable. I have seen that lift many times now but still: what the actual fuck.
I would love to hear what Layne Norton does wrong. Since you have a clip of him in the start of the video.
Cheat on his wife
i don’t know why, but squats have always come naturally for me, like all the other lifts are weird and hard for me to understand, but i understand squats like nothing else.
What happened to squat book guys
Still working on it! The app took over big time ⏲️
Launching a supplement, writing curriculum for seminars and camps, and launching an App took up a lot of time 😂😂🙈
ok but we can all agree pena is still a goat tho
Great video, although unless Giulas bar is a 5kg anti-gravity bar I think the caption is wrong.
Awesome video, but that belt squat stock footage really doesn't drive your point home given the woman is literally squatting with a negative shin angle lol.
That being said, do you disagree that, at some point a person's femurs are so long compared to their upper body that they just can not avoid a good morning squat? The bar has to be in the center of gravity even for us lanky dudes unfortunately, and there comes a point with ankle mobility where more will get you more upright, but at a cost of a weaker position. Layne Norton is a great example of this. Dude's all legs, he'd have to touch his knees to the ground to dorsiflex enough to make up for that ridiculous femur length.
Honestly, we haven't met or helped that person yet. They MAY be out there but we haven't seen them. It might need some work but no ones squat is unfixable
@@sikastrengthConfirmation bias perhaps?
jokes on you I'm a powerlifter
Damn you 🤣
😂😂😂😂😂
Matt vena:"if you good morning a squat its because your body is telling you its more efficient. If youre an only lifter only good morning woth the angle you can still dona clean with"
8:32 LOL
Showing a bunch of clips of world level weightlifters isn't exactly the best choice for a video about how to correct a squat-morning pattern. Let's face it, almost every weightlifter at the world stage have proportions that make an upright squat comparatively easy. Examples of people like Zack Telander are far more instructional for the average Joe who is probably going to have to commit to a lot of forward lean early in the squat.
Having helped 100s to 1000s of lifters it's a fallacy to assume that average lifter needs poor squatting mechanics
Fitz also said thank you for calling him an elite lifter
Definitely not true, it took me two years but I have a upright torso when I squat now. I have long femurs. Everything stayed helped a lot, also just front squat more, forces you to be in a upright position 😅
Make a video yourself and see how it expedient it is to find the perfect clips for every 5-15 second scene lol
Cope
It's funny in the thumbnail for this video you show a guy doing a low bar squat. But yet in talking about this issue you only ever talk about and show people doing high bar squats.
Well in the low bar squat there's going to be forward lean, yeah, maybe not as excessively as like a good morning but maybe like even a 45° angle.
for some reason i read how to stop the moaning squat
Sir this is a Wendy's!
panash thumbnail lol
Spot on... He is the absolute posterboy for that horrible squatting form
For the algo
surprised i'm not seeing any panagiotis fanboys defending their master here in the comments
🤣🤣🤣
Algorithm
Work your front squats.
Mark Riopetoe wont like this vídeo...
Isn't the lowbar squat basically a good morning? Lol😂
No.
torso angle is meaningless really. the bar is going to find it's way over the mid foot no matter what. so if you have long femurs and tight ankles, you will have a good morning squat period. dorsiflexion or heel elevation is the only thing that can save long femur individuals, and usually the heel elevation from weightlifting shoes isn't enough. also ankle mobility isn't improvable in most individuals, you've got what you've got plus or minus maybe a centimeter
thats absolute black pill bullshit
Sorry bud, might have to stretch for once in your life
Pushing knees out to the side is also an option for some lifters with long femurs. This “shortens” the femur in the front to back direction. This works in terms of physics, but not always in terms of anatomy as some people have very deep hip sockets.
3:58 Sam Webster's channel is youtube excellence
ofc bald omni man pop up when mentioning rows 😂