Common Form Mistakes #1: Staying too upright on the Squat
When I coach the squat, one of the main mistakes I see are people trying to keep their torso too upright. If you understand physics at all, you realize this will either cause your heels to shoot off the floor and destroy your knees or if you somehow manage to sit back with your torso staying upright you will fall backwards on your butt. Either way…ouch.
The guy on the left above is a great example of keeping the torso completely upright while the heels come off the floor. This guy’s knees may be OK, just don’t throw a barbell on his back. There is a huge difference in stress between doing this with only body weight versus loading up for heavy resistance.
This classic picture taken from Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, helps us to see the second part of the fallacy of upright torso; falling backwards. Look at the middle picture of a high bar back squat. Note the back angle, now imagine the lifter somehow kept his torso upright. Where does that shift his center of gravity? If you answered “behind his feet”, ding ding ding, we have a winner. That guy is now on his butt. Even while viewing the front squat at the far left of the image, we see how a perfectly upright torso is simply not possible. The front squatter still has to maintain a slight angle of the torso to keep himself balanced.
Why? What is this torso angle accomplishing?
The angle of the torso is keeping the center of gravity of the heavy barbell over the midpoint of your feet. So why do many first time squatters try to keep their back so upright? Two reasons as far as I can tell.
First, from a young age we are told to use the knees and not the back when we pick things up. A noble idea, but one often misconstrued. The advice to use the knees and not the back was meant to prevent the locked knees and rounded lower back posture often seen in people when they bend to pick something off the ground. Compared to that, bending the knees is preferable. However, people do not realize that just because the back bends over doesn’t mean the back is doing the work. If you keep the back straight, then the burden falls on the muscles of the hip joint which perform extension, i.e. the glutes and hamstrings.
Second, the client hears the word “straight” and associates it with “vertical”. I do want to see a nice neutral spine position with a natural arch in the lower back and thus I will tell clients to keep a straight back. But a straight back can be “straight” whether standing completely vertical or bent at the hips and parallel to the ground. Straightness is defined as the spine’s relationship to other areas of itself, and not spatially in its relationship to the ground.
Accept that your torso will lean. And like the image from Starting Strength, I hope it can be seen that the forward lean is relative to the bar placement. As the bar shifts backward in terms of your center of gravity, your body leans more forward to compensate. This forward shift changes the stress from more quad dominant to more posterior chain dominant. Hence, why most people can typically low bar back squat more than they can front squat.
If you want to move tons of weight like the guy below, don’t try to keep your torso upright. Happy Squatting!
