Mastering the Squat: Essential Techniques for Injury-Free Strength Training

Why do squats deserve a spot on the Mount Rushmore of strength training? Discover why this fundamental lower body exercise is essential for effective movement and overall fitness. Join Rob Maxwell as he breaks down the mechanics of squats, emphasizing the crucial roles of the quads, glutes, and hamstrings. Rob tackles common pitfalls like improper form and excessive depth, which can lead to back pain, and shares insights from a recent client case to highlight the importance of maintaining proper technique for injury prevention and maximizing benefits.

Learn how vanity, genetics, and lifestyle factors impact your ability to squat correctly and how neglecting lower body workouts can create imbalances. Rob dives deep into the role different muscle groups play in a balanced and effective squat, stressing the importance of proper form and mindfulness during exercise. For those looking to refine their technique, Rob offers personalized feedback to help you on your fitness journey. Share your squat videos for constructive advice and support the podcast to keep the invaluable insights coming! Join us for an educational and practical episode that promises to enhance your functional fitness and keep those aches and pains at bay as you age.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to. There's a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell, I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I'm the owner of Maxwell's Fitness and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to talk about the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why it works. Before I get to today's episode, I want to thank our very first sponsors, jonathan and Lynn Gildan of the Gildan Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home selling and they have the sales and reviews to back it up. If you need anything in real estate, please give them a shout 386-451-2412.

Speaker 1: 0:49

So let's talk a little bit about the world's greatest strength exercise, and you know we can debate what that is, and there's probably a few that I would agree that are worthy to be on the Mount Rushmore of strength exercises. So let's keep it at that. What is one that absolutely deserves to be up there and why do I want to talk about it today? So the squat absolutely needs to be on our Mount Rushmore of strength exercises. The squat is one of the most, if not the most, foundational exercises that we need to be able to do, and be able to do efficiently and effectively as human beings.

Speaker 1: 1:50

The reason why I want to talk about this today is because I had somebody come in the other day that I work with from time to time and he kind of needed a reboot with his workout program because he'd been having some issues with his lower back Nothing too extreme, like he doesn't necessarily have a condition that can be diagnosed regarding chronic low back pain that gives him some trouble, annoys him, that he doesn't like, which you know can't blame him I don't think anybody likes low back pain. So he came in to kind of like, look at his program that I'd given him a few months ago and see what we can do to try to get rid of that back pain. And he had some guesses before he had come in. He felt like potentially that his goblet squat he was doing he was either doing wrong or potentially too heavy and you know he was probably right on that. So he was self-diagnosing his problem pretty well, I feel. And he also heard one of the podcasts that I did last month about squat depth, when I was talking about range motion and exercise, and he said you know, I'm probably part of that 70 degree club, which means that if you can get down to 70 degrees, you are, for the most part, getting the effectiveness out of the squat exercise and not having to go to 90 degrees. And some people should stop at 70 or even higher if they have to, because their back goes into too much spinal flexion and they're not able to maintain the back posture that they're supposed to. Yet due to following silly advice that they might see on the internet, spoken or unspoken, they kind of force themselves down lower into what some people call the ass to grass way of doing a squat, and then that just causes more problems because now they're squatting deeper with worse form, and he was correct on that too. He is part of that 70 degree or higher club, which there is nothing wrong with. So he comes in and we spent probably roughly about 45 minutes on trying to figure out how we can correct his posture on a squat. And then afterwards he said you know, thanks for this session today. That was great, it was very helpful, perhaps a podcast and I thought well, I've talked about the squat so many times that maybe I don't want to do that again. But then at the same time you know, I think I've talked about it a lot, but people out there continue to have these kind of problems. So you know, maybe I haven't talked about it too much, so let's do it. So let's first understand, like, really, what the squat is.

Speaker 1: 5:12

The squat is simply a lower body exercise that is a compound exercise, meaning you use two, or in the squat is primarily the quads and the glutes, with some assistance from the hamstrings. Now you will hear people often say and you see it on posters and you see it in magazines they say that it works the big three of the lower body, the glutes, the quads and the hamstrings, which is sort of true, but not completely true, because the hamstrings don't have nearly as much involvement as the other two, the quads and the glutes. Now, the joints involved primarily and I'm talking about concentrically and eccentrically, meaning the joints that actually move and go into flexion and extension, and not the joints that are affected, because there would be even more than that. You could probably argue almost every synovial, which is main joint in the body, is being involved in a squat. We could probably argue that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the joints that actually go through flexion and extension are going to be the hips and the knee joints. All right. So that means the main bones involved in the squat is going to be the femur, which is moving primarily up and down. All right.

Speaker 1: 6:51

So the joint actions involved in the squat and don't worry, I'm not just going to list all this scientific anatomy and physiology stuff and put you to sleep, I just want you to have a full understanding of the squat the joint actions involved is knee extension that's what makes the quads go. So the knee extends. Whenever we talk about a joint action, we're talking about the concentric portion of the movement, meaning the movement where you're actually pushing up in the case of the squat, not lowering yourself. So it's knee extension that we go into from the knee, which is why it's the quad that is heavily, heavily, heavily used. And then hip extension, which is primarily the quads and the glutes, because the hamstrings do assist in hip extension, so they do come in some, but not very much.

Speaker 1: 8:02

All right, so what happens then? So, basically, if we walk ourselves through a squat as we, 90 degrees, and your knees are behind your toes and your back is at the correct angle, which is up, and not rotated into lordosis, into kyphosis of the upper shoulders, which is what was happening to my subject the other day. I told him I said you had some lordosis that we needed to fix, and he had some kyphosis in the squat, which we had to attempt to fix as well. So, as we're going down, we're at 90 degrees Now. We're on our way up, all right.

Speaker 1: 9:06

What happens then is, if we're pushing off appropriately from our heels, like we're supposed to be and a lot of times that is a matter of focus, but more than that, it's a matter of what our body is accustomed to doing. If we have extremely tight calves gastrocnemius and we're used to not pushing off from the heels, what we're going to end up doing is pushing off more from the front of the foot, which is the toes, putting us in a very compromised position and not engaging the glutes nearly as much as we should be. So if that is the case, then we are using more quads, so we're compounding the problem, which a lot of people have is very weak glutes. All right, because what should happen is, as you're at 90 degrees and you start pushing up through your heel until you get to say 70, 60, somewhere in there, it's primarily a gluteus maximus is the muscle that you're using. So, like squats, if somebody has a really good, great squat, let's say they're a very athletic football player and they're known to have a very dominant squat or leg press or something like that Chances are they have very well developed glutes.

Speaker 1: 10:36

So I kidded with my subject the other day and I said, hey, what are gorillas? I said, what are gorillas in the jungle like, really known for muscle wise? And he thought he says, oh, real, big upper, big upper body. So I said, yeah, but even more than that, they've got like these huge developed glutes. Right, if you've ever been to a zoo, you know that and you know the reason why I know that is because, studying physiology and all that, we've used gorillas as kind of like the great example of a very powerful land animal. You know, one of the most powerful land animals, especially pound for pound. So they have amazingly strong glutes, all right, and too often the glutes get neglected. Now here's why.

Speaker 1: 11:59

So what happens is, as we're going down and we get to around 60 degrees, as I say, now the quads start to get involved and that's about halfway down to halfway up, and that's great. The quads need to be strong. The quads are so critical and so important, but now they start to take over a little bit more. Now if you're squatting properly, you're still keeping your glutes and your quads and, I said it earlier, your hamstrings, slightly engaged, so all of them are staying engaged if you really have experience of being a strong squatter. But what happens with a lot of people and guys I'm mostly going to talk to you is they don't have very well developed glutes at all. And you know, some of this is just opinion, and educated opinion, but it's still true. All right, you're, you're using my 30 years and you have to just trust my opinion on some of these things or don't, but it's still, I believe to be pretty factual.

Speaker 1: 13:09

What happens is we're very vain as a species, right, I mean, and that's not overly bad. I mean, we can be very vain. We're, we're very concerned about how we look and again, as I said, that's not bad per se. It's only bad if you get carried away with it or if it like leads to poor health or poor decisions or whatever. But ultimately, you know, some vanity is a good thing. So, growing up, the girls, the women typically I know I'm generalizing typically care a lot more about their glutes than guys, like guys don't typically walk into a gym and go oh man, I want to build my butt up, I mean sometimes, but ordinarily no.

Speaker 1: 13:50

They think you know, if anything with their lower body, they want good calves. Why, I don't know. Maybe because they wear long baggy shorts all the time and that's the only thing showing you know. But typically they want big biceps, they want big pecs. So they spend a lot of time bench pressing, they do curls and again, maybe the, the calves, get some work in there, right? I mean, that's always the joke that I'm sure anybody that's been around gyms long enough knows. You know, there's even t-shirts that are made with these guys with these huge upper bodies and spindly little legs. And then it says you know, these guys with these huge upper bodies and spindly little legs, and then it says you know, don't skip leg day, right.

Speaker 1: 14:28

And then women tend to be kind of the other way around. They're not overly concerned with building up their upper bodies, and you know they want nice legs and they want good glutes. So because of that, because so many of us are motivated by our vanity, we tend to like seek out exercises that are going to work that a little bit more. And we do our own research and find out like oh then, how do we engage that? How do we make this exercise better? Like most women that I've worked with through the years, when I start talking about squatting and squatting properly, they already know. Like they'll say, well, if I put my feet out a little bit further and like you know, if I keep the weight on my heels and I get a little bit lower, I know I'm hitting my glutes more. I'm like, right, and they do it.

Speaker 1: 15:11

So what I'm saying is is that part of the issue why many guys maybe this gentleman struggle with that is we just don't learn to do it at a very early age. This is for the people that do work out a lot just don't learn to do it at a very early age how to squat properly, because it's just maybe not hugely important at the time, like it's not important until it becomes important, meaning we realize how important lower body is to our activities of daily living and we're we start having body aches and pains whenever we try to do more of it, because we better work our lower body as we get older. If we want to have great ADLs, there is no question about it. So that's one of the issues. The other issues is we do have different conditions that we can get from our jobs or we can get from genetics, and that is basically the way our spine rolls, from genetics, and that is basically the way our spine rolls. So if we tend to push our hips very far forward, like in a thrusting position, so to say, that's called lordosis and what ends up happening?

Speaker 1: 16:20

There is the hips, or I should say the pelvis is too far in front of the body and you tend to have what we call a sway back. Think of somebody with a beer belly They'll have that sometimes. Think of a pregnant woman they will have that sometimes. So oftentimes it does have something to do with where we distribute our weight, but not always. So that can lead to not squatting properly, because, think about it, if your spine's in sort of an awkward position and you're squatting down, it's not like it's going to suddenly morph into the right position as we go with load. So that could be it.

Speaker 1: 16:59

And then there is kyphosis, where you have more of a convex posture and the shoulders kind of roll forward, and again that could be genetics and that could be our work. So if you work at your computer a lot and your posture is bad. You're always leaning on your knees, for example. I'm leaning on my knees right now as I'm speaking to you, but I'm pulling my shoulders back, keeping my spine straight as I do it, because I know how important posture is. And that is literally something I did with the gentleman the other day. Say, hey look, even when you're sitting, you have to be very cognizant of what you're doing with your posture, because bad habits do not get fixed overnight. You're going to have to do it, do it and do it All right. So the third reason so I've named vanity simply most men skip squatting properly, growing up, quotations, growing up like growing up in the gym. The next reason is potentially different, kind of like lordotic or kyphotic curvatures, which we all have. Something we have to fix with that.

Speaker 1: 18:08

And then the last one and I don't think it's the case with this gentleman, but it is with many is ego. So we want to tend to use the weight that other people are using, but we can't do it right. And so, rather than just kind of like go to the drawing board and say you know what, I'm going to leave the ego aside and I'm going to do what I got to do and squat properly. You know that's what you should do. You don't. So you end up using too much weight either with a dumbbell, doing a goblet squat.

Speaker 1: 18:41

I really don't believe that was the case with this gentleman. He seems to check the ego at the door, so to say, but it's very common with many people. It's just, you know, ego is silly, you know, when you get down to it. I mean I, you know, we all have ego issues at times. I'm not trying to like look down on anybody, but that you know. So I'm calling myself out here, I'm calling you out, I'm calling anybody out that lets their own ego because we all have one get in the way of what's best for us. Like, we might be just too concerned with doing this in front of people because so-and-so is using more weight or whatever. It's just silly, but we do it. And so if we don't want to do that, we have to remind ourselves that we're at the gym to build strength, not to compete and not to demonstrate strength. Right, we are there to build strength.

Speaker 1: 19:33

So that could be the third way why we end up squatting improperly, because what ends up happening is people get stronger in the wrong squat posture. So sure they're squatting better. Man, I can squat 300 pounds and you look at them and it's a legal squat, like they're getting parallel the weight's down. You know all of those things are making an official squat and maybe a lot of people would have no idea. Here's the problem with that. It could be in totally the wrong posture. You're probably probably tempting fate on getting hurt, so like just because you can do it, it doesn't mean it's right. And also when you do that, you're strengthening the wrong muscle groups every time you do it. So when you do go to squat properly, you're blown away at how awkward it feels.

Speaker 1: 20:28

Like this gentleman, his heel kept turning out, like he would start to squat down and we go. I think it was. It was his left foot, I'd say left foot, left foot, left foot, because he kept turning his toes out, out and out. And we call that a compensation Whenever we're trying to get our body into a position that we know it needs to be in. But other muscle groups are trying to assist us and in this case it would be the glute medius and the glute minimus is actually causing what we call a hip external rotation to help them get in that position. Well, we don't want that. We don't want, in this case, those hip internal rotators getting stronger. We want them to stand their guard, we want them to hold their position so the correct muscle groups, the glute maximus, can learn how to get stronger. It was amazing Just all these little things pop up, then the heels would pop up and then you're on the toes because now the quads are taken over.

Speaker 1: 21:28

All these things happen when we're not cognizant of what's going on, which is why, if you have a concern with this, you really need to have somebody film you or watch you squat and really learn to begin to squat properly. So this is what I had him do and this is what I'm going to tell you to do. If you are not squatting at least to 70 degrees again 70 degrees you're almost getting full benefit. You're getting like 95% of the benefit. So if you're squatting to roughly 70 degrees, which is like a three quarter squat, and your heels are staying on the ground, you're not externally rotating your feet, your back is not going into forward flexion, which is mostly what this guy was doing. So if you're doing all that, then great, but if you're not, then what you need to do is fix it.

Speaker 1: 22:26

You have to learn to keep your chest up. So the angle of your back should always be at the same angle as your shins. So if somebody took a profile picture of you, they should be able to draw parallel lines from your spine, you know, going from your butt through your head, and then do the same thing with your shins, and they should be on the same arc. Then you know you're squatting properly. So when somebody says, keep your spine perfectly straight, that's not really true. No, no, no, there has to be an angle. Of course there's an angle, it's just we have to have the proper angle. So we have to make sure that we're doing that. We have to keep the knees behind the toes. We have to keep the knees centered with the toes and not what we call adducting. So one of the things I see women do sometimes is their knees come in because their adductors are taking over, trying to complete the movement, and we need to make sure we are somewhere between 90 and 70 degrees, not further than that. So that's how we do it. Now how do we get there?

Speaker 1: 23:34

Practice with no weight, like squat, is already a fairly hard exercise to do correctly without load. I'm not a big proponent of using a ton of weight with the squat like a dumbbell or a Smith machine. And, by the way, just to throw this in here, a leg press is a squat exercise. It's just a squat done on a machine. So it's a lot easier to maintain that form on the machine. I'm not saying replace it, I love to do both. I'm just saying that, like if you wanted to train heavier, use the leg press as you are working on your squat form. But you don't need to use a lot of weight when you squat, especially when you're learning to squat properly.

Speaker 1: 24:20

Now another thing you can try. So that's step one Reduce your load. Start with body weight. Make sure you got that down to a science before you start adding load. Start with body weight. Make sure you got that down to a science before you start adding load. Next thing is put a two by four or two plates, like 10 pound or five pound plates, under your heels. That will help you keep the better angle and help you engage your glutes more, because you're going to be pushing your heels into these weights as you're driving upward. That will help you tremendously. And the third thing you can do is slow down. Make sure that the whole time you're squatting down on your descent, which is the eccentric portion of the exercise that you're keeping your chest up and engaging your core the whole time.

Speaker 1: 25:13

A lot of people don't know what engage the core means. So what I did with this gentleman is I said, you know, as he's kind of in a plank position, I said hey, I'm going to kick you and I do that motion. What do you do? You brace your core, like you brace yourself. Right, that's what we mean. And a lot of people are like what does that mean? It means brace yourself, Like if, for whatever reason for God, I'd hate to even think of the circumstances you'd be in with it sounds like very terrible. But like if you're in a plank position and somebody is going to come up and like maybe it's your kid, he's going to like kind of run into your side. I mean what are you going to do? You're going to brace that core, you're going to brace yourself. That's what it means. Engage that core. That will help you keep your chest up, but we have to slow down to do that.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Don't do this exercise, or any exercise, mindlessly. Really, really focus on that. All right, and I'll just wrap this up by saying, if you're not sure I mean, you know I'm here to help I like to help, send me a video of your squat. I will look at it and I will say, oh okay, let's work on this. Or, you know, maybe I'll say, hey, it's great, you know so, so do that. I don't mind doing that. All right, and you know what you're going to do for me, because, because you love this podcast and you're a friend of the show, please share this with other people. Please share it to your own social media and text it to a few friends. I would love it because the more downloads I get, the more that it helps me and, basically, the less I have to pay. So that would be really, really nice of you.

Speaker 1: 26:47

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