Squat

[rubthebuddha]

indeed. speaking of pullups, anyone know of a good brand of bar you can buy that won't rape your doorframe?

[IronFist]

This is how I squat except:

1. I don't put my heels on anything.
2. I use collars (!)
3. I don't use a belt.
4. I use spotter bars in a cage or rack.



Why aren't the weights falling off? The bar is bent and there's no collars?

[Ford Prefect]

Good question. Maybe Arnold's ego is so dense it creates it's own gravitation field which is pulling the plates inwards.

I squat completely different but to each his own. Both are "correct" ways to squat.

[IronFist]

Originally posted by Ford Prefect
Good question. Maybe Arnold's ego is so dense it creates it's own gravitation field which is pulling the plates inwards.

^ rofl

I take it back. That's not exactly how I squat.. my feet are wider than that.

But the main reason I posted this was to get a good picture of someone squatting low. That's how low I go when I'm doing regular squats (as opposed to box squats, which I love now). The box that we have at my gym has me end up maybe .5-1" higher than that, but still just a tiny bit below parallel. I love our box cuz it happens to be the perfect height for my proportions.

I never understood why some people, especially high-level weight lifters like Arnold, need plates under their heels. I imagine it's a flexibility issue, right?

Ford, post a picture of how you squat just for comparitive issues. I'd take a picture of my squatting but my gym is strict and won't allow cameras in.

I guess I could take a picture of myself squatting with like a broom handle or something in my own house since I have no barbells, just for form comparison.

[Ford Prefect]

http://www.ipapower.com/images/photos/photo012.jpg

I use a wider stance than in this but the rest seems mostly right... squat back not down, keep my knees rotated out, rip ground apart with my feet. I only got slightly below parellel when free squatting.

I can't remember what the board under the heels is for. I know it's mentioned in plenty of BB articles I've read.

[IronFist]

Originally posted by Ford Prefect
http://www.ipapower.com/images/photos/photo012.jpg

I use a wider stance than in this but the rest seems mostly right... squat back not down, keep my knees rotated out, rip ground apart with my feet. I only got slightly below parellel when free squatting.

I can't remember what the board under the heels is for. I know it's mentioned in plenty of BB articles I've read.

Holy crap you have your feet wider than him? His feet are practically at the edge of the rack! His left knee isn't really over his left foot, however, there is a bit of distortion in that photo that you can tell from looking at the ceiling, or looking at the vertical parts of the rack that would be parallel in real life.

I think I remember the board under the feet being for if your calves aren't flexible enough to allow you to keep your feet flat on the floor as you go all the way down. Some people's heels naturally come up as they near the bottom of the movement, so I think putting the board under the heels just lets them keep their feet on something so they're not balancing on their toes at the bottom with a lot of weight on their backs. I've actually seen people squat like that before; with weight on the bar and their heels coming up at the bottom.

[Ford Prefect]

Yeah. After I typed the post, I realized that his feet were pretty wide, and figured it was just some abstract of my mind telling me that I was that wide. I didn't feel like editting.

That could be it with the board. I know I've read a use for this in Ian King's stuff though. I just can't remember off the top of my head.

[abobo]

The board under the feet is probably like plates under the heels, or shoes with heels, which let you go deeper while keeping the upper body a little more upright. The knees go forward more, though.

Bodybuilders who do it are probably just thinking about blasting the quads.

[Toby]

Forgive me - I'm too lazy to do web research on this, so I'm hoping you guys can help me out. When squatting heavy (for me ) if I'm reaching my limits, after coming down to the bottom position, I feel like I lose my lower back arch and lift with my back a lot more (well, exclusively with my back for a good half foot or so). Sorta like a dodgy good morning since my back must be rounded after I lose the arch. I can't do it now without weights, so I'm finding it hard to describe. Also, it happens when I'm struggling, so I don't really have time to analyse what's going on. I don't do squats like that picture of Arnie Iron posted a few weeks back. I go down to just below parallel, not all the way down, and I stand with a wide stance, just over 3/4 of the width of my power rack.

Am I setting myself up for injury? Should I just drop the bar onto the spotter bars if I feel I'm losing form? I mean, I can still get the bar up, but I definitely use my back a lot more to do it. Am I describing a common squat form problem? Are my legs too weak to lift so I go and rely on my back instead?

Thanks in advance guys.

[fa_jing]

Try tensing your abs like a mutherfckr when you are approaching the bottom position and keep them tense until you are out of the hole.

[Ford Prefect]

Yes, you are setting yourself up for injury. Not because of your squatting style. I squat the same way and it is considered a powerlifting squat. You'll eventually injure your back and maybe slip a disc if you lose your arch like that especially with heavy weights.

You need to strengthen your arch and your lower back. I'd recommend doing arch back goodmornings and stopping squats for a while. It's basically a Goodmorning, but instead of doing them with a neutral back, you arch and you arch HARD! You will not be able to go as low and still maintain this arch, but that is expected. The ROM will be smaller than a regular goodmorning.

Doing pull-throughs is also a good way to strengthen the lower back and posterior chain. You may want to add those after your goodmornings. Start at 5 sets of 8 and add a set every week until your are doing 8x8. PM me with your email addy and I can send over an mpeg of pull throughs.

You are only as strong as your weakest link. You're squat will probably go up after doing all this even though you are not squatting...

[GeneChing]

Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee
A young boy in Delhi, India looks pretty comfortable in this posture.
GET LOW
THE FORGOTTEN ART OF SQUATTING IS A REVELATION FOR BODIES RUINED BY SITTING
By Rosie SpinksNovember 9, 2017
Sentences that start with the phrase “A guru once told me…” are, more often than not, eye-roll-inducing. But recently, while resting in malasana, or a deep squat, in an East London yoga class, I was struck by the second half of the instructor’s sentence: “A guru once told me that the problem with the West is they don’t squat.”

This is plainly true. In much of the developed world, resting is synonymous with sitting. We sit in desk chairs, eat from dining chairs, commute seated in cars or on trains, and then come home to watch Netflix from comfy couches. With brief respites for walking from one chair to another, or short intervals for frenzied exercise, we spend our days mostly sitting. This devotion to placing our backsides in chairs makes us an outlier, both globally and historically. In the past half century, epidemiologists have been forced to shift how they study movement patterns. In modern times, the sheer amount of sitting we do is a separate problem from the amount of exercise we get.

Our failure to squat has biomechanical and physiological implications, but it also points to something bigger. In a world where we spend so much time in our heads, in the cloud, on our phones, the absence of squatting leaves us bereft of the grounding force that the posture has provided since our hominid ancestors first got up off the floor. In other words: If what we want is to be well, it might be time for us to get low.

To be clear, squatting isn’t just an artifact of our evolutionary history. A large swath of the planet’s population still does it on a daily basis, whether to rest, to pray, to cook, to share a meal, or to use the toilet. (Squat-style toilets are the norm in Asia, and pit latrines in rural areas all over the world require squatting.) As they learn to walk, toddlers from New Jersey to Papua New Guinea squat—and stand up from a squat—with grace and ease. In countries where hospitals are not widespread, squatting is also a position associated with that most fundamental part of life: birth.

It’s not specifically the West that no longer squats; it’s the rich and middle classes all over the world. My Quartz colleague, Akshat Rathi, originally from India, remarked that the guru’s observation would be “as true among the rich in Indian cities as it is in the West.”

But in Western countries, entire populations—rich and poor—have abandoned the posture. On the whole, squatting is seen as an undignified and uncomfortable posture—one we avoid entirely. At best, we might undertake it during Crossfit, pilates or while lifting at the gym, but only partially and often with weights (a repetitive maneuver that’s hard to imagine being useful 2.5 million years ago). This ignores the fact that deep squatting as a form of active rest is built in to both our evolutionary and developmental past: It’s not that you can’t comfortably sit in a deep squat, it’s just that you’ve forgotten how.

“The game started with squatting,” says author and osteopath Phillip Beach. Beach is known for pioneering the idea of “archetypal postures.” These positions—which, in addition to a deep passive squat with the feet flat on the floor, include sitting cross legged and kneeling on one’s knees and heels—are not just good for us, but “deeply embedded into the way our bodies are built.”

“You really don’t understand human bodies until you realize how important these postures are,” Beach, who is based in Wellington, New Zealand, tells me. “Here in New Zealand, it’s cold and wet and muddy. Without modern trousers, I wouldn’t want to put my backside in the cold wet mud, so [in absence of a chair] I would spend a lot of time squatting. The same thing with going to the toilet. The whole way your physiology is built is around these postures.”

continued next post

[GeneChing]

ChinaReuters/Stringer
In much of the world, squatting is as normal a part of life as sitting in a chair.

So why is squatting so good for us? And why did so many of us stop doing it?

It comes down to a simple matter of “use it or lose it,” says Dr. Bahram Jam, a physical therapist and founder of the Advanced Physical Therapy Education Institute (APTEI) in Ontario, Canada.

“Every joint in our body has synovial fluid in it. This is the oil in our body that provides nutrition to the cartilage,” Jam says. “Two things are required to produce that fluid: movement and compression. So if a joint doesn’t go through its full range—if the hips and knees never go past 90 degrees—the body says ‘I’m not being used’ and starts to degenerate and stops the production of synovial fluid.”

A healthy musculoskeletal system doesn’t just make us feel lithe and juicy, it also has implications for our wider health. A 2014 study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that test subjects who showed difficulty getting up off the floor without support of hands, or an elbow, or leg (what’s called the “sitting-rising test”) resulted in a three-year-shorter life expectancy than subjects who got up with ease.

In the West, the reason people stopped squatting regularly has a lot to do with our toilet design. Holes in the ground, outhouses and chamber pots all required the squat position, and studies show that greater hip flexion in this pose is correlated with less strain when relieving oneself. Seated toilets are by no means a British invention—the first simple toilets date back to Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium B.C., while the ancient Minoans on the island of Crete are said to have first pioneered the flush—but they were first adopted in Britain by the Tudors, who enlisted “grooms of the stool” to help them relieve themselves in ornate, throne-like loos in the 16th century.

The next couple hundred years saw slow, uneven toilet innovation, but in 1775 a watchmaker named Alexander Cummings developed an S-shape pipe which sat below a raised cistern, a crucial development. It wasn’t until after the mid-to-late-1800s, when London finally built a functioning sewer system after persistent cholera outbreaks and the horrific-sounding “great stink” of 1858, that fully flushable, seated toilets started to commonly appear in people’s homes.

Today, the flushable squat-style toilets found across Asia are, of course, no less sanitary than Western counterparts. But Jam says Europe’s shift to the seated throne design robbed most Westerners of the need (and therefore the daily practice) of squatting. Indeed the realization that squatting leads to better bowel movements has fueled the cult-like popularity of the Lillipad and the Squatty Potty, raised platforms that turn a Western-style toilet into a squatting one—and allow the user to sit in a flexed position that mimics a squat.

“The reason squatting is so uncomfortable because we don’t do it,” Jam says. “But if you go to the restroom once or twice a day for a bowel movement and five times a day for bladder function, that’s five or six times a day you’ve squatted.”

While this physical discomfort may be the main reason we don’t squat more, the West’s aversion to the squat is cultural, too. While squatting or sitting cross legged in an office chair would be great for the hip joint, the modern worker’s wardrobe—not to mention formal office etiquette—generally makes this kind of posture unfeasible. The only time we might expect a Western leader or elected official to hover close to the ground is for a photo-op with cute kindergarteners. Indeed, the people we see squatting on the sidewalk in a city like New York or London tend to be the types of people we blow past in self-important rush.

“It’s considered primitive and of low social status to squat somewhere,” says Jam. “When we think of squatting we think of a peasant in India, or an African village tribesman, or an unhygienic city floor. We think we’ve evolved past that—but really we’ve devolved away from it.”

Avni Trivedi, a doula and osteopath based in London (disclosure: I have visited her in the past for my own sitting-induced aches) says the same is true of squatting as a birthing position, which is still prominent in many developing parts of the world and is increasingly advocated by holistic birthing movements in the West.

“In a squatting birthing position, the muscles relax and you’re allowing the sacrum to have free movement so the baby can push down, with gravity playing a role too,” Trivedi says. “But the perception that this position was primitive is why women went from this active position to being on the bed, where they are less embodied and have less agency in the birthing process.”


Reuters/Carlos Barria
Children in the West squat with ease. Why can’t their parents?

So should we replace sitting with squatting and say goodbye to our office chairs forever? Beach points out that “any posture held for too long causes problems” and there are studies to suggest that populations that spend excessive time in a deep squat (hours per day), do have a higher incidence of knee and osteoarthritis issues.

But for those of us who have largely abandoned squatting, Beach says, “you can’t really overdo this stuff.” Beyond this kind of movement improving our joint health and flexibility, Trivedi points out that a growing interest in yoga worldwide is perhaps in part a recognition that “being on the ground helps you physically be grounded in yourself”—something that’s largely missing from our screen-dominated, hyper-intellectualized lives.

Beach agrees that this is not a trend, but an evolutionary impulse. Modern wellness movements are starting to acknowledge that “floor life” is key. He argues that the physical act of grounding ourselves has been nothing short of instrumental to our species’ becoming.

In a sense, squatting is where humans—every single one of us—came from, so it behooves us to revisit it as often as we can.

I often cite squatting as the key to CMA. We don't squat enough in America.