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(703) 444-0662 Hours 21620 RIDGETOP CIRCLE STE 150, STERLING, VA 20166
(703) 444-0662 Hours 21620 RIDGETOP CIRCLE STE 150, STERLING, VA 20166
02
Jun

The Ultimate Squat Guide

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Want to learn how to squat?

Understand how different squats can help you reach your goals?

Clean up your stance?

Be able to drop it low without hurting yourself?

This, and the answers to all your squat questions can be found here…

This is not meant as a straight read-through (although you are more than welcome to), but rather, pick and choose the sections that matter to you or you have questions about.

… and then, when you’re ready, go even deeper with all of the other squat articles linked at the bottom.

 

Table of Squat-ents:

  1. What is a squat?
  2. A basic movement to get you started
  3. What should your knees be doing in a squat and how fix your knee position
  4. Heavy squatting vs. healthy squatting? Which one is better?
  5. How to find YOUR squat stance
  6. What is the difference between wide squats and narrow squats? Is one better than the other?
  7. What do you do if you get HIP pain when squatting
  8. What do you do if you get KNEE pain when squatting
  9. What should my neck be doing while squatting?
Let’s start easy...

1. What is a squat?

A squat is a fundamental human movement, and the ability to perform a squat is something we want to hang on to for the rest of our lives. In a squat there’s a bunch of knee bend, the hips lower towards the floor, and you feel your legs working a whole lot.

2. A basic movement to get you started

What follows is an excerpt from a past blog by Tommy, “You Don’t Know Squat“.

 

Reaching Plate Squat:

The reaching plate squat is usually our first squat variation we use with members because it serves as a great teaching tool. By reaching a plate out in front of us it serves as a counter balance and reflexively makes our core work a little harder too. This is a great starting point because it teachers proper balance and how to squat with health in mind.

 Put another way, they’re cooler than being cool. Or, ice cold you could say.

 

Let’s see it in action:

 

In order for the weight to not pull me forward, making fall on my face in the process, there has to be a weight shift backwards. This is helpful because one of the things we like to do when squatting (and in life) is shift forward onto our toes. When we fall forward, we lose our heel, we feel a lot of pressure on the balls of our feet and we can’t access our big butt muscles. This robs us of the mobility we need to squat.

We need to access our mobility by positioning our body a certain way so we can squat appropriately, and thus we have the reaching plate squat…

3. What should your knees be doing in a squat and how fix your knee position

What are the knees doing?

The position we are shooting for is something we call “stacked”. The knee is really good at dealing with forces appropriately when your thigh bone (femur) and your lower leg bones (tibia + fibula) are “stacked” on top of one another.

Two very common and faulty knee positions seen when squatting are:

  1. Varus collapse: synonymous to pushing the knees out too far apart and the inner part of your foot, your arch, starts to lift off the floor
  2. Valgus collapse: synonymous to the knees diving in towards each other and the outer part of your foot starts to lift off the floor

The knee is really good at transferring and dissipating force when “stacked”. In this position our knees can accept and deal with load appropriately.  However, in these two instances, the two contact bones in our knee are no longer on top of one another and we leak power.

When this position is altered, the soft tissues and passive structures in the knee kick in to help us deal with the load and can be associated with MCL, ACL, PCL, and meniscus injuries—all things no beuno.

 

Here’s the fix:

Varus Collapse → “Feel your whole foot” (find and feel your big toe, little toe, and heel)  

Valgus Collapse → “Spread the floor” + “Feel your hole foot” (find and feel your big toe, little toe, and heel) 

 

Notice how the “feel your whole foot” cleans up BOTH issues. When you start to bias one part of your foot, you’re going to get a collapse at the knee (in our out). If you can find your big toe, little toe, and heel and maintain that throughout your squat, you’re golden!

4. Heavy squatting vs. healthy squatting? Which one is better?

There are a number of ways to squat correctly…

Let’s dig deep on healthy vs. heavy squatting—two very different ways to squat—and both are correct.

These two squats fall on completely opposite ends of the spectrum.

On one side, we have a squat where the goal is to lift a bunch of load, create a bunch of force, and get really strong and powerful. Let’s use the athlete example. They just want to be super strong and super fast so they can win at squatting and their sport. Cool.

They need to create lots and lots of tension and stiffness. They use this tension/stiffness to be stronger, faster, and more explosive. So, they might look up when they squat, arch their back a lot, sit really far back (almost like a deadlift), and tense up every part of their body even their ears so they can lift the most possible weight.

Might look a little something like this:

Shifting gears over to a squat for health, it’s going to look and feel very different. You’re not going to want to create quite as much tension, you don’t arch quite as much and instead, get a little belt buckle before you sit down, by doing this you can achieve a lot more depth. You might not be able to lift quite as much, but you are going to feel a lot better. The goals with this squat is not to create a bunch of force and lift a bunch of weight, but to find a position that gives you the most mobility.

Looks like this:

These 2 squats are both correct. You just need to ask yourself, what is important to me?

What do you want your squat to do for you?

5. How to find YOUR squat stance

We commonly experience one of two things:

  1. Individuals come in to the gym and squat with their feet too straight forward, robbing mobility (depth) from their squat
  2. Individuals at the gym ask, “Where should my feet be when I squat (and deadlift)?”.

 

Well, here you go:

 

6. What is the difference between wide squats and narrow squats? Is one better than the other?

Let’s work this equation backwards, starting with a few why’s and allow that do drive your decision making process, as there are always going to be pros and cons.

And just so we’re on the same page, let’s say wide is well outside shoulder width and narrow is where the at or about hip width.

Wide squats orient the hip in a way that tends to allow for maximal loading. Wide base of support = stable base to place and support heavy loads.

With this wider stance you can sit or “reach” back with the hips, effectively loading the bigger, meatier muscles  of the hips, hamstrings, and back.

Bigger meatier muscles loaded = potential for more weight lifted

And, if your knees feel weird, taking this wide stance transfers some of the stress from the knee and places it on the hip.

More hip loading = less knee issues (if knee’s don’t feel very good)

Now let’s talk about a more general pattern, wherein the feet are under or slightly outside shoulder width.

If we were to drop it low from his position where the feet are underneath us, this takes advantage of our leverages and we get a more “balanced” load in which the muscles share the work (because we all know sharing is caring!)

With this squat you get a little knee (quad stuff) a little hip (glute/hamstring stuff) and not to much low back stuff (due to less forward bending).

This is a healthy pattern that works well for a lot of people.

But, is this ideal for maximal loading? Probably not.

However, if your goal is to train for health, it’s likely best to squat with a more “traditional” stance.

Now that you have some ideas for “why” when choosing squat stance, go forth and drop it like a squat. 

Just make sure that your stance matches your intent…

7. What do you do if you get hip pain when squatting

Oh boy, here’s a big one! Let’s break it down into some manageable chunks so you can get back to squatting and living pain free…

First, your squat might be really good but, you’re STILL getting pain—what gives?! You might have a capacity problem. For example, if you’re lifting to be really strong and all you do is heavy ass squats for 1’s, 2’s, or 3’s, and you never really spend time with lower intensity, higher volume squats, it can become problematic.

“Train for volume before intensity.” – Dan John

You likely need to spend some time building up your strength-endurance. This is your base—your foundation. Strength needs to be built upon a rock-solid foundation of endurance. So, make sure you change up your reps, spend some time with some higher numbers, and build your base!

But I still hurt!

Okay, now we can start to talk about positioning and what your squat looks like. If you take a peek at the section about healthy squatting vs heavy squatting, you might find some answers.

Here’s the spark notes version.

If you’re squatting with a wider stance, you arch your back a ton, and sit way back into your hips, your knees don’t really bend, your back is turned on your over tense everywhere.

It might look a little something like this:

You may just need to pull yourself towards the other end of the spectrum. Bring your stance in a little bit, allow your knee to travel forward, get a little “belt buckle” before you sit down (this will turn off your back a little bit), this way your share the load rather than putting all that force on the hip and the back!

It ends up looking something like this:

Last thing, maybe squatting isn’t the right thing to do right now. Maybe we need to work on some single leg movements and train our squat pattern a different way, build up some foundational strength and then bring the squat back into the picture. That’s okay too…

8. What do you do if you get KNEE pain when squatting

One of the biggest reasons people feel knee pain is because of a forward weight shit that happens when they sink down into a squat.

It looks something like this:

When we lose our heel, we jam ourselves into our ankle and put a lot of extra stress on the knee. The simple fix here is to “feel your whole foot” (see #3 above).

There is another other thing we can adjust though…

Sometimes, when that knee travels forward as it should in a squat, the knee (for whatever reason) can’t deal with the forces well and, OUCH!, you feel pain.

We can UNLOAD the knees a little bit by adopting a slightly varied squat position.

Take a look: 

Here, I’m really reaching back, my shins are staying vertical, and I’m loading my hip more, taking some stress off of the knees. This might be all the fix you need.

Still no good?

Here’s where things get a little weird, you could have the perfect squat position, it could look really good, your angles might all be spot on and yet, you still get knee pain. Pain is ultimately constructed in the brain so sometimes there are things we can’t really influence. You might also have an injury that needs treated. In this event, see a physical therapist. 

If you still don’t have answers, try other squatting patterns and variations. Maybe a split squat feels better, maybe a front foot elevated split squat feels fantastic, or maybe a heavy sled push gets the job done.

Big takeaway, don’t force the squat if it’s not happening.

9. What should my neck be doing while squatting?

Our skeleton (the bony structure under skin), is oriented a certain way to support our movement and provide us with structure. This matters because while there is some “play” from skeleton to skeleton, person to person. There are accepted normal curves of the spine that allow us to function.

Our upper neck, right at the base of our skull is called the cervical spine and from the side it should have a slight concave curve (dips in). We want to keep this curve as we squat. If we exaggerate the curve by looking straight up or flatten the curve by jamming our head back and pulling our chin to our chest, we lose this natural curve, close off our airway, and ultimately change the way we move the rest of our skeleton.

Now the remedy for this has to do with anchoring your vision to a fixed point out there in the world. Find a spot on the floor that’s maybe 10 feet in front of you and lock in on it as you squat.

This does two things:

  • One, it focus’s your visual system.
  • Two, it keeps that natural slight curve in your neck so you can keep your mobility while you squat. You could even tell your buddy to sit on the floor in front you and stare lovingly into their eyes as you squat… or not.  That’s cool too.

And check out these other squat articles!

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