Avoid these squatting mistakes and you'll be lifting much more and more safely!

Eliminate these three biggest squatting mistakes, and you'll be lifting more and more safely!

Squats are probably one of the best exercises for overall strength and muscle development. And as with any other exercise, learning the basic stance and movement pattern is essential to prevent injury with squats.

Not everyone's squat will look the same, but there are beginner mistakes you can avoid.

Mistake 1 - Wrong stance or carrying the barbell out of the rack

A good squat starts with a good stance. The most common mistakes include:

• Placing the barbell too high in the rack and taking it out on your toes.
• Failure to engage your mid-body and lats before removing the axle from the rack.
• Feet too far apart when removing the axle from the rack. This will make it hard to get along.
• Backing up too far with the axle on your back.

Remedy

1. Place the axle in the rack at chest height. Under heavier weight, your spine will shrink a little, making you smaller. You don't want to take the axle off at the toe-off.
2. Take a deep breath, clench your midsection, and pull the axle downward to engage the lats before beginning the attempt. This will make the axle feel lighter and reduce the compression forces on your spine.
3. Start with your feet hip-width apart. Only after the axis has been brought up, straddle your standard squat stance width. For most people, this will be little more than shoulder width with the toes slightly turned out.
4. Take about 3-4 steps backwards. Longer dances with the wasp on your back will cost you quite a bit of precious energy.

Mistake 2 - Squatting to the knees and looking straight up

Start the squat lowering by moving your hips backwards. How far? This will be different for everyone. It will also depend on the type of squat: it will be different for a front, back, or axial high squat. The most common culprit of squatting too far into the knees is looking straight up.

For some practitioners, a slightly upward gaze can be beneficial (especially in the front squat), but too much head tilt, where you are de facto looking at the ceiling, forces you to shift your center of gravity more to the tops of your feet. And this is a problem for several reasons.:

1. It puts more strain on the tendons around the kneecap, which sooner or later will bring knee pain.
2. Shifting your center of gravity forward can lift your heels off the ground. This is a very unstable position. Ideally, you want to keep your weight spread between your thumbs, pinkies and heels.
3. Looking up can lead to excessive arching of the back. This puts more strain on the spinal extensors.
4. It can cost you a little bit of power due to the transfer of force through the entire body.
5. It makes it difficult to get enough depth, especially if you are trying to get under the parallel bars.

Remedy

Before flexing the knees, simply pull the buttocks back a little. Try to look straight ahead at a point say 1.5 - 2m away from you.

This will improve your power transfer, balance and take the weight off your knees.

Error 3 - Chest and hips do not rise together

When lifting off the floor, the chest and hips should go together. This indicates that you have properly contracted your midsection, are using a manageable weight, and are avoiding excessive load on your spine.

If this isn't happening, it's probably a classic good morning squat.

In this abomination, the hips rise faster than the chest. It may be a fault of technique, but most of the time it will be due to too much weight on the axis, not enough tightness in the middle of the body, or not enough quadriceps strength exerted in the down position.

This is not just a beginner's mistake. Sometimes it happens to most people, and it's due to loaded weight.

If it happens to you once in a while and at the end of a heavy set, it can be survived. But if your sets look like this from the first to the last rep, you're probably just training for ego.

This is definitely a beginner's problem and will one day result in disaster for your spine!

Remedy

Increase mid-body strength and quadriceps strength. Train technique with lower weight.

I recommend training the midsection with many exercises that force it to resist some movement, such as Pallof presses, weight bearing, stir the pot (in the video below), and front weight bearing.

You'll improve the transfer of power through your quadriceps by using a deeper and narrower stance during squats, which I recommend incorporating at the end of your workout.

Source: www.t-nation-com - Are You Making These 3 Rookie Squat Mistakes?

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