Master the Barbell Squat in 10 Minutes

In this video, I'm going to hopefully teach you the very simple, but difficult to master technique for the barbell squat. That is how the video opened, and the word simple is doing a lot of work there, because the squat has maybe five things you have to get right, and each one of those five things takes months of reps to actually own.

Now, in my opinion, the barbell squat is the absolute staple of any leg training and probably the most effective for building big, strong, tapable legs. When researchers put a barbell squat up against a flywheel squat inside a six week in-season soccer program, the barbell group got the hypertrophy response while the flywheel group did not, which tells you the loaded bar on your back is doing something that fancier equipment does not automatically replicate (Filetti et al., 2023).

Admittedly, during the first five to ten years of my weight training, we'll say, career, I probably neglected this movement the most. And the reason is because it's painful, it's hard, it's challenging, and in order for you to really bring your body to a place where it needs to adapt, you've got to make this shit hurt.

And the barbell squat is definitely going to be, we'll say, a good measurement of the quality or the character of a human being, as if they have the ability to put themselves under a bar and suck and move the weight.

So with that said, before I actually get under the bar, I want to explain a couple things that's probably most important to you.

Here is the whole chain, top to bottom, so you have the map before I zoom into any one piece of it. You find your natural bottom position on the floor with no bar at all, then you learn to drop your pelvis into that position instead of folding forward into it, then you learn to drive out of it through three points on each foot with your knees tracking out, then you pick a bar position that matches your femur length, then you set your hands and elbows so your upper back stays locked, and then you go deep enough to actually count.

Everything else in the squat is a detail hanging off one of those six things.

Start with the feet, because your stance reports on your hip anatomy rather than reflecting some style you picked. But before I show you what that looks like, some people wonder if they should use closer feet, wider feet, and I can tell you the easiest way to figure out where your feet go is where do you feel most comfortable bringing your knee to your chest.

Lie on your back and pull one knee straight up toward your shoulder, then pull the same knee up and slightly out toward the armpit on that side, and one of those two will feel open and the other will feel like it stops early against something solid.

Bone is meeting bone at that stopping point, and there's nothing you can stretch your way out of. The angle at which your femur sits in the hip socket, plus the shape of the socket rim itself, decides how far the thigh can travel before it runs out of room, and no amount of stretching changes the angle a bone was built at.

Some people, their hip insertions, they just don't have the ability to bring their knees all the way up to their chest that way. I happen to be the kind of guy who has the mobility to go both, so I've got pretty open, we'll say, hip insertions.

The direction your femur points is 100% preference. You have to find what works best for you.

And the best way to do that is pretend like you're in the woods and you've got to let one loose. Nobody in that situation squats with their toes dead forward and their knees pinned together, because your body already knows where your hips open up and it will put you there without being coached.

You're going to try to get down into a position like a caveman before they invented chairs that's really comfortable for you.

And right now, I'm a solid 220 pounds. Even when I was 280 of muscle, big bodybuilder size, I could still get down into this position and sit here all day long, which matters because people blame bodyweight for lost depth when the real problem is they never found their stance.

Sit in that bottom position for two or three minutes a day with nothing on your back, and let that become the squat you're actually training toward, since the bar is only there to visit a shape your hips already own.

There is a cue about sitting back with the hips between the heels rather than sitting down and forward, and I use it because it changes what people look like immediately, but I have never seen a study that isolates that positioning and measures low back load against the more knee-forward version, so treat it as what I see with lifters and not as something the literature has settled.

Next comes bar path, and this is the piece most people have never thought about at all. The barbell has to travel in a straight vertical line over the middle of your foot, up and down, and every joint in your body arranges itself to make that happen.

Turn sideways to a mirror and squat with no weight, watching the point where the bar would sit. If it drifts forward you are going to feel it in your low back, and if it drifts back you are falling with it. That's perfect technique when it just goes down and up.

One of the big mistakes that a lot of coaches teach involves the foot, telling you to push through your heels. That's not necessarily true.

Think about your foot as a tripod, with the heel, the ball behind the big toe, and the outside edge behind the little toe, all three loaded at once like a bird foot gripping a branch. Heel-only pressure pulls your center of mass backward, and forefoot-only pressure lets the heel lift and the knee slide forward, and neither leaves you with a stable base to push from.

And that's exactly how we want to do the squat. Grip the ground with your toes, feel all three points, and shove.

Everything your knees do downstream connects back to that tripod. Loaded up heavy, most people's knees collapse inward as they come out of the hole, because the muscles that hold the femur from rotating in are weaker than the ones driving the lift. That's why you want to focus on driving your knees out, pushing through the tripod on your feet.

There's high bar, sitting on your traps, and low bar, sitting back here on your rear delts.

Low bar puts the weight closer to your hips, which means your torso has to lean further forward to keep that bar over your foot, and the movement becomes a hinge. Longer femurs push you that direction whether you like it or not, because a long thigh bone forces more forward lean to keep the bar path honest.

Where a guy like me, I have shorter femurs, it's going to be more of a quad dominant movement, where I'm sitting straight down, and that's the key difference.

The bar sits on muscle, not on the bone at the base of your neck. If you don't have the traps to make a shelf, that is a training problem, and putting a loaded bar on bare vertebrae for years is how you end up with a lump back there.

Hands go close, no wider than they have to be, shoulder blades pinned back, elbows pulled forward and down. Pull the elbows back and the shoulders roll with them, the upper back softens, and the bar starts sliding.

For a guy like me who's my size with not so much shoulder mobility, this can become painful, try to find a position that feels comfortable for you, but ideally you want your hands to be as close as possible together, because that's going to help to force your elbows into position and keep your shoulders tight.

Almost everyone quietly cheats themselves on depth without realizing it. Parallel does not mean your thigh looks flat, because the top of your thigh sits higher than the front of your knee at that point and you have not actually reached it.

The crease of your hip has to drop below the bend of your knee. So that's what parallel is.

So when I go down, I have to make this crease go lower than this crease, and that's actual proper depth.

Research: Filetti et al., 2023; Hagerupsen et al., 2024

References:

Filetti C, Ruscello B, Leo I et al.. Hypertrophic adaptations to a 6-week in-season barbell vs. flywheel squat added to regular soccer training. J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 2023. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35415999/

Hagerupsen K, Pedersen S, Giller NB et al.. Comparison of resistance training using barbell half squats and trap bar deadlifts on maximal strength, power performance, and lean mass in recreationally active females: an eight-week randomised trial. BMC Sports Sci Med Rehabil. 2024. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38816857/