attn: Iron re: full squats

[fa_jing]

Coming up from the bottom, how would you describe the motion? Where is your weight distributed on your feet? What muscle groups fire and in what order? How do you manage the angle of your back? Do you let your knees go over your toes?

The reason I ask is that I'm still trying to figure out the form on these.

[Ford Prefect]

Shins should still be pretty much perpendicular. Your knees can come forward but never past your toes. Drive with your heels. Imagine trying to push the floor away from you. Back should be arched or at least neutral during the whole thing.

If your knees go past your toes = weak hamstrings and/or tight hips.

Back rounds = not flexable in hips

Took me a bit to transition to being able to do full squats when I started OL'ing. I even went to an OL coach to make sure I was doing everything right.

[fa_jing]

Thanks Ford. At what point do the quads engage the most? I usually don't feel it very much in my quads and I have trouble using my strong quads to move the weight.

Edit: If I fire the quads hard coming out of the hole, it helps me but then I end up leaning a bit forward and it becomes more like a PL squat in terms of the angle of the back.

[Ford Prefect]

Hmmm... Good question. Honestly I never paid much attention to it, but basically from bottom to a little below parellel is a quad-dominant movement. Your hamstrings are disengaged until you start getting close to parellel.

It's not a bad thing to lean into it. Actually now that I think about it, knees over toes isn't always a bad thing either. A technique you'll see a lot of oly guys do is when they are a bit past parellel, they'll dip their legs forward so their knees are over their toes and then straighten up and drive through. It's complicated to explain, but easy to demonstrate. It basically puts the hips directly under the bar and makes the squat a lot easier. I'll try to find a video on the web. It looks herky-jerky, but it's actually good form. Both my OL coach and the US OL team coach (who's tapes I have) demonstrated it.

[Ford Prefect]

Alright. Found this:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ph.chea/Koing%20140kg%20x%202reps.wmv

His knees come a bit too far forward on the decent, IMO, but he does the herky-jerk thing on the ascent I was talking about. It looks like a PR attempt which could explain it, but I figure with a little hamstring strengthenning, he'd be able to sit back more and minimize his knees coming that far forward.

[rubthebuddha]

i notice when that chap comes up, it seems his legs straighten a little but his upper body barely moves, so it makes him bend more at the hips/back. is that correct, as i thought the upper body would need to begin to upright itself more to take the stress off the lumbar? :confused:

[Ford Prefect]

It's a technique used to lift more weight. You dip your hips under the bar, so you can drive up from there. If he tried to do a text-book squat, he probably wouldn't be able to do two reps and possibly even one rep.

[IronFist]

Sorry I've been busy and haven't had time to post much.

[fa_jing]

Hey, that video is pretty much like what I started to do the other day. Probably slightly better than my form of course. Good to know that's a valid approach.