One of the MOST important exercises, the barbell squat masterclass. (1:10)
   An exceptional lower-body exercise that has an amazing carryover effect throughout the whole body. (4:32)
   Squatting is a FUNDAMENTAL human movement. (10:14)
   The distinct types of squats. (11:16)
   All complex movements have a substantial risk of injury if performed improperly. (14:36)
   The requirements needed to perform a proper barbell squat. (16:23)
   The BEST priming movements to perform before squatting. (23:15)
   The workout: The placement of the bar, how to bail safely, slowly working up to heavy set, avoiding failure, best tempo, and number of days per week. (31:26)
   Advanced squatting techniques. (41:17)
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Today's episode is all about barbell squatting.

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All right here comes a show The king of all exercise the barbell squat It is true.

It's phenomenal for developing the lower body, but a lot of people also see upper body gains from getting better at the squat.

So today's episode is all about the barbell squat.

You can't come out and make that statement after I just made the argument

I lean more towards this is the king personally.

But yeah, it's just in terms of being able to address the entire kinetic chain and strengthen the entire body, there's like really no question the squats right there.

It's so beneficial in the sense of when you look at the time spent squatting and the value and the results that you get from the squat, there's really very few exercises that we can even put in the same conversation, okay?

Getting better and stronger at barbell squatting, you can take 5 other exercises and combine them and you might not even get close.

So it's just exceptional And anybody who's ever done barbell squats for a long period of time and really perfected them and worked on them will tell you, it's definitely 1 of the best exercises.

From a muscle building perspective, athletic performance, There's got great general carryover.

Now, I know that there's a lot of functional, you know, arguments that come out.

And once you get better at a sport, or should I say, as you start to get more specialized and become more of an expert of a sport, then the training needs to become more specialized.

But when it comes to general carryover, barbell squats are up there.

You get stronger barbell squat, you'll see lots of carryover into other physical pursuits.

And then from a fat loss perspective, because such a large muscle mass or so much of your muscle mass is affected, when we talk about the metabolism-boosting effects of building muscle, and then what that does for fat loss, like, you know, the squat is incredible.

Like, if you're trying to get lean, barbell squats are gotta be up there because of the amount of muscle that they build.

It would be really cool to see a physique that is someone who only squats like 3 to 5 times a week.

And to see what kind of physique would be built from just that.

It'd be pro I bet you it would be more surprising than you would think as far as like how aesthetic and how, how good they would, they could look just from that because of how much of the entire body is activated from.

Now, and we're assuming it's like perfect form, full range of motion, they're incorporating explosive with slow tempo, Like that's all they did was just master the squat, all of its variations, nothing but that.

I bet you would build a pretty good looking physique.

Now of course you would need more nap for balance and

But I think the point that you're making is so much is activated.

Obviously a barbell squat is widely known as a lower body exercise.

And that's, I mean, that's somewhat true, right?

A lot of the muscle building effects and the strength building effects are to the lower body from the hips down.

But you also have a lot of core activation, low back stability, you need to have a strong, stable low back, upper back, you need to have a good, stable thoracic spine.

And really like it puts a lot of pressure on the upper back, which, you know, you don't really consider that.

Just to hold the bar in place and just to be

There's an old saying, this is an old bodybuilding saying.

And When I first read this as a kid, I thought, that's really weird.

But then I experienced it myself and it said, if you want to add a half an inch to your arms, add 50 pounds to your squat or something along those lines.

I remember reading similar stuff that said, like, you want to increase your bench press by 30 or 50 pounds, increase your squat.

And it's like, okay, how's that make sense?

And I think part of it has to do with the fact that there are some limiters in the body in the sense that it will only allow you to get as strong as it thinks you can handle safely, and you'll only build as much muscle as your body believes is safe from a balance perspective.

If I don't build my legs very well, my upper body's only going to get so big.

We see very interesting studies where they'll take and they'll put a leg in a cast and immobilize it, and then they'll train the other leg.

And yes, the leg that gets trained builds a lot of muscle, but the leg that's immobilized actually loses less muscle than had they not trained the other leg to begin with.

So there's like this interesting kind of balancing carryover effect.

And barbell squats are like 1 or 2 in terms of like this systemic kind of muscle building signal.

Most of it, of course, localized to the main muscles of the lower body, but there is this interesting systemic effect that happens from barbell squats.

is why we can really narrow it down to kind of like those 2 main lifts, either between the deadlift camp or the squat camp because of how you can load such a substantial amount of weight for both of those exercises.

And then that how much force you have to generate be able to sustain and protect the spine, but also to be able to generate enough force to then move all of that weight up and down.

It's gonna affect all the muscles that are lighting up to, to, to produce and, and, and create a stable environment for that.

It'd be interesting to know how much of that is attributed to just the overall load volume that you're, you're training with, because you can train at such a high load with those 2 movements, and how much of that is attributed to what it does for the CNS?

I think they're all so closely connected.

It's the second heaviest exercise you'll probably be able to do.

Some people can squat more than they deadlift, but usually that's the other way around.

So it's 1 of the heaviest weights you'll ever lift.

And it not only loads the lower body, but it loads the spine and the upper body as well, thus strengthening all of those things, thus making the entire body strong.

You're, if you're holding, you know, you get strong at the squat, your core has to be able to support that and stabilize.

It has to be able to stabilize your spine.

So your core gets really strong and stable at the very least in the squatting position, but definitely lots of carry over everywhere else.

So that means your obliques or your abs, your transverse abdominus, the whole lumbopelvic hip area.

I mean, all those muscles that keep everything from falling apart, they have to be able to support you during an exercise is going to be extremely heavy.

So you get a strong core even from doing, you know, barbell.

Oh, I think that was 1 of the main contributors to eliminating my low back pain from squatting.

Aside from it opening my hips up and the work I had to do on my mobility work on my hips, but also just the slow progression of load on the squat and getting stronger and stronger, strengthening my core.

And that being supportive for the low back, I actually think that that has a lot to do with why that went away.

Once I started to squat and squat heavier and heavier, all of a sudden I didn't have this low back pain, which is so ironic because what you would hear even from doctors is people get low back issues, oh, don't squat, Stay away from squatting.

And so a lot of people I think connect squatting as this, oh, dangerous thing, or if you have back issues that you should stay away from it.

Part of the reasons why I made the excuse of why I didn't like to squat was, Oh, my back doesn't feel good as a threat.

And it was all it really was, was I needed to work on squatting properly, opening my hips up so I could get a fuller range of motion, get a stronger core.

And then all of a sudden that all came together for me, you know?

It's interesting to me that that's always like their go to.

You're going to eliminate a fundamental movement instead of just introducing it in a progressive way of progressively overloading yourself.

So you just get a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger, more capable, adding more load to where the, to the point where it becomes, you become way more resilient towards any of these other type of stresses that you're gonna face that would hurt your lower back you know from being weak and not supported.

Yeah it's interesting you mentioned it's a fundamental movement it is now there's other movements that are considered fundamental at walking, running, throwing.

Twisting, squatting is AAA fundamental human movement, meaning you don't want to, You don't want to lose the ability to squat.

Now you can see this often in third world countries.

And before the invention of chairs, this is probably how we relaxed, But we didn't just sit in it, we also had to have enough mobility and strength to jump up out of a squat if something happened or if we needed to do something.

Or if we were gathering, we're down in this kind of squat position.

People are like, my low back hurts when I bend over doing stuff.

That's probably not how we did lots of things on the ground.

And again, we know this through modern hunter-gatherers.

So it is a fundamental human movement and you want to keep those around because your body was designed or evolved to be able to maintain or have those kind of movements.

And when you lose them, you actually lose other types of functions.

Now, there are different types of squats with the barbell on the back.

The 2 main variations are the low bar and high bar squat.

That just, that basically is talking about where the bar is placed on the back.

Now, Olympic lifters tend to like to do the high bar squat and power lifters tend to like to do the low bar squat.

Really doesn't make a big difference for the average person which 1 you pick.

I will say that the high bar probably, well, definitely requires more mobility.

More skill and more mobility than the low bar, especially in the ankles.

But other than that, I don't think it's a big difference.

I think there is a body type that each of them are better for.

For example, if you have somebody who has, if you know you have a very long torso, a low bar squat seems to be more advantageous or easier for you to master because of how long your torso is.

And so putting the bar lower so that when you hinge over, it's still center of your foot.

Tall people in general, but even more so with a long torso, right?

Or that is going to be more advantageous.

And if you have a shorter torso, I think it's easier for you to do a high bar squat.

That being said, I think there's tremendous value in working towards the ability to do both.

I had to start being a tall person, long torso.

I had to start with more of a low bar squat to start with.

And over time, working on my ankle mobility, my hip mobility, getting a greater range of motion, being able to sit upright, I then could get to a high bar.

But I couldn't do a high bar right out the gates.

I didn't have the skill set or the mobility, and so it was easier for me to start with a low bar.

1 thing to touch on too before we continue are the pads that people put on the bar when they do a squat.

Placing the bar on your back, if you've never done it before, you don't know the right position, it can hurt.

Yeah, it's like it's on your back or it's on your spine, on your neck, that hurts.

First off, if you place the bar properly, It doesn't hurt at all.

You could support a tremendous amount of weight.

I mean, you know, people will squat 5, 600 pounds with the bar just plainly on their back and there's no issues whatsoever.

So it's not, you're just not placing it right.

Also, when you put a pad on the bar, you do raise the center of gravity.

So you've made your squat a higher bar squat than normal.

So a high bar becomes a very high bar squat, and a low bar squat becomes a high bar squat because of the circumference of the pad.

That changes your biomechanics, it changes your movement.

It actually also potentially moves the bar away from your body, requiring you to hold it more with your hands.

Even though your hands are on the bar on a barbell squat, the hands aren't really holding the bar.

In fact, really, really good squatters, and there's videos of this, they'll take their hands down and the bar will rest on their back without them supporting their hands.

Or a lot of them, you know, you'll see with like their fingers, they're just their fingers

I really watched him get in and he wraps in and then like his like fingertips are the only thing that's holding 600 pounds on his back.

And I'm saying that cause you know, I don't want people think they have to hold it with their hands behind their back, because that's not a great position to be in.

As far as the injury is concerned, I want to touch on that.

All complex movements have a high risk of injury if you can't do them.

So if you do a squat improperly or you use a weight that's not appropriate or you lack the prerequisite stability or strength, then the risk of injury is pretty high.

And that's just because it's a complex movement.

And by the way, all exercises are dangerous when you don't have the prerequisites to be able to perform them.

Barbell squats just are more complex, require a little bit more stability and mobility than most other, not all exercise, but most other exercises.

It takes a little more practice, you know, to get good at it.

But the beauty of that is you get way more reward for doing that, just like investing or anything else.

It's like You can be really, really conservative with your exercise choice and do things that don't give you a major return, but then don't expect this amazing physique or amazing results to happen overnight because you're doing movements that are very low risk and don't give you a lot of return.

Yeah, But not to mention this though, which makes it different from investments, which is when you do it right, it's perfectly safe.

There is no danger to doing any exercise that you could perform with the right strength for the weight that you're using, mobility and stability.

So if you get hurt doing an exercise, it's not the exercise that hurt you.

It was your inability to do the exercise appropriately.

And that Again, that could be your stability, mobility, or just you used an inappropriate weight or whatever.

So, it's not the exercise that hurt you, it's you that hurt you.

So what are the requirements when you do barbell squat or to be able to do a good barbell squat?

You have to have, for sure, good hip and ankle and thoracic mobility and stability, but definitely hip and especially ankle.

A lot of people don't know this, but ankle mobility issues probably cause more bad squats than almost anything else.

And that's because when you squat down, your ankles have to bend quite a bit to allow your knees to move forward.

And if you don't have the good stability and mobility in them, then what ends up happening is your feet will try to twist and turn out as you go down, or your heels will lift, or your knees will start to move in funny directions.

And now you're turning a safe exercise into something dangerous.

Very simple way to test this, to know if this is your limiting factor, is If you go, if I take somebody and I just do this, my family all the time and like get them to go as low as you can squat down as low as you can and hold it.

And if you go as low as you can and you hold it and it's uncomfortable, legs are burning like crazy shins are like, you can't hold that position comfortably.

It's your ankles that aren't allowing you to get down there.

If you take yourself and you put yourself on a slant, right, or elevate the hills, and then you could sit all the way down comfortably, you

Now, a lot of times, if you have somebody who has poor ankle mobility, yet they've continued to squat really, really heavy, then it sometimes limits, it becomes the hips also in addition to that.

But more often than not, I've been able to get somebody into a really deep, good squat simply by just addressing

By the way, what contributes to ankle mobility issues is also a foot that is weak and unstable.

So you might be thinking, what the heck is that going on here?

Well, if you looked at an anatomy picture of the bottom of a foot, it's covered in muscle.

And those muscles have to be stable and strong to support you when you're doing anything with your lower body.

So if the foot is weak and you squat, the foot will flatten or your ankle starts to pronate and then you'll start to see ankle mobility issues as well.

The hip has to be strong and stable enough to keep your knees from getting lots of problems because the hip is such a versatile joint that if it's not able to keep you in a strong position and your knees have to prevent things from twisting, well now you've got yourself

You need those knees to be in a secure position and not wavering inward or outward, having internal, external rotational problems where I can't keep my knees tracked in place to where the, that stress inevitably is going to end up, where those weak points are.

So if my weak points are bringing me in, you know, that force is all gonna go right to that point of weakness versus it traveling then through into the ground and out.

The other thing too is hip mobility issues often look like back pain, especially at the SI area, the sacroiliac joint.

So if you get low back pain, that's kind of like to the right or to the left.

So like, you're like, oh, my low back hurts.

And you're like, well, it's kind of on the side of my low back or on either end.

And oftentimes it's because you don't have good hip mobility and good hip strength.

So you try to squat and the hips aren't able to support what you're doing and that joint gets a little overstressed and it feels like low back

Any time that we have chronic pain anywhere, it's weakness somewhere else being expressed there, right?

So that's when you have an issue and you're like, oh, my knees hurt, oh, my back hurts, oh, my shoulder hurt, oh, you have these areas that bother you, it's because you have weakness or dysfunction somewhere around there that needs to be addressed.

You address the weakness, the instability near there, and then you find that the pain goes away.

And that's worth, and that's going back to my low back pain.

I just had weak and stable hips that I hadn't been trained in focusing on.

I wasn't doing a lot of lateral movement, lost all that stuff.

Started to focus, focus on that and the pain completely went away because now I had strong, stable hips.

Yeah, you also want a really stable and strong core.

Those are all the muscles that surround the spine, the lower back, but also the muscles that contribute to the stability of the spine.

Believe it or not, the lats actually also contribute.

And there's hip flexor muscles that contribute to a stable core.

So it's not just the abs and not just the obliques, right?

There's lots of muscles that surround the spine and then ones that contribute from the bottom and from the top that stabilize it.

You want all those muscles to work together to provide good stability.

Because there is an appropriate strength ratio or should I say relationship between these muscles.

And if 1 muscle, let's say, is stronger than it should be in that relationship, now you have an increased risk of injury.

So similar to like people will get like hamstring pulls because they don't have the right quad to hamstring strength ratio when like you see this with sprinters.

That means you don't just want to have a stable core because your erector spinae muscles are stable or just because your abs are strong, or just because your obliques are strong.

But you might want to also have, or you should also have, strong transverse abdominis.

It's the muscles that surround the spine that you draw in on.

These are the muscles on the side of the spine that stabilize you laterally.

You wanna have good hip flexor strength and stability.

You wanna have lats that aren't too tight, but also stable, because that also stabilizes the core.

And basically, you wanna have a good, well-functioning, stable core to be able to perform squats, or at the very least, use a weight that's appropriate for your core so you don't end up over- You

want everything packed and tight and supportive and, you know, addressing the thoracic mobility as well.

And I've seen this with my own clients where if you have these desk jobs, a lot of these jobs we have these protracting shoulders and I'm starting to, that's now affecting the way that my posture is going into the squat and I have rounding in the back.

And that sort of unfavorable postural position will create stress points where that load is going to drive right into those weak points.

Some of the best priming slash warmup movements you could do now, priming is very individual, but the ones we're about to go over probably apply to most people that will help them accomplish better squats.

When you become a master of barbell squatting, which takes a long time, then you probably are not going to need to prime nearly as much.

Then you can literally prime by doing the squat itself as a warmup.

Because you're so connected to the movement, you know what muscles to activate, you know what good position feels like, then warming up with a squat is not a problem.

There's a lot of strength athletes that say that priming is stupid and worthless.

Well, maybe for them, because when they get in a squat, they know how to activate what they need to.

But when I would train clients, like whenever you're teaching any complex skill, I'd have to break it down into pieces.

I couldn't say, let's practice a light squat, stabilize your hips, focus on ankle mobility, brace your core, like do 15 different things at 1 time.

You can't cue a client who's just learning how to exercise for his time to retract your shoulders, open your hips, you know, like,

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2135: Barbell Squat Masterclass