If you want to be a powerful athlete, you’ve probably looked heavily at ways to boost your max squat number (and rightfully so), but there are important considerations in the journey to do so.
Ever since I started reading about training, and then considering my performance goals, I was generally struck with a major concept.
I wasn’t “strong enough,” and needed to increase my lifting numbers.
I’ve loved lifting and training for decades, but big 1RM’s haven’t come naturally to me. After lifting weights since the age of 12, I hit maximal lifts of around a 215lb bench press and 255lb x 5 deep squat at 175lbs bodyweight at age 18, while having dynamic outputs of a 6’8” high jump, 21’ long jump and touching a few inches above the top of the square on a basketball hoop (around an 11’7” touch at 6’1” tall).
As I began college, and even to a degree through my mid-20s, I was strongly influenced by the idea of elite athletes in the speed and power department, who had very high strength-to-bodyweight/squat-to-bodyweight ratios. A 2x bodyweight deep squat was so often the recommendation for athletes who wanted to maximize their power abilities.
For me, being so woefully short of this, despite years of training, was difficult, since it wasn’t easy to move that needle of barbell strength, while elastic training and plyometric progress came very easily.
Granted, I am 100% an elastic athlete. If you listened to my recent podcast with Ross Jeffs, or some of the episodes with Christian Thibaudeau, you know that elastic athletes have a different relationship with heavy barbells versus their more muscle-driven peers when it comes to being faster, jumping higher, and generally getting more skilled and powerful.
“Concentric” or muscle-driven athletes have a more straightforward relationship with improved lifting numbers, muscle-tonus in the anterior chain, and things like sprint and jump performance. They lift heavy, and they are energized for power!
Even for these muscle-driven athletes, however, there will come a point of diminishing returns and transfer from bilateral barbell strength, but it is something that will be of more importance to them throughout the training weeks and months of their careers versus athletes who carry more elastic or fascial nature in their movements.
This being said, one of the things that has stuck with me in a major way has been the idea of those athletes who are very powerful and have great lifting numbers to boot; which is that they didn’t get those lifting numbers because they spent more time in the weight room than their peers.
Those athletes got those big lifting numbers from
- Being genetically gifted
- Being explosive in their sport play, sprinting, jumping, and general human movement practice
- Combining that explosiveness in sports with their work in the weight room
The athlete who might be more elastic, or have less genetic expression for power, who has, say a 1.25x bodyweight squat will not make great athletic gains by simply grinding it out in the weight room until they reach a 1.75x bodyweight squat or more.
I can’t stress this enough; simply grinding it out in the weight room to hit a better squat is not your best bet in training for more power. Sure there are muscle-oriented athletes who may improve their standing vertical or short acceleration ability in training like this for a few months time, but eventually, the neurological issues that arise from the imbalance will start to creep in, and reactivity will start to become seriously compromised.
The adaptations that would take place in a “just get strong” mentality would be specific to powerlifting and would include becoming more lower back dominant in their movement profile, neurologically disconnected, and reducing the connection and output between the feet and the glutes.
This being said, athletes can get more powerful, and even stronger in the squat without overly focusing on it (this being more a key for elastic athletes). I’ve found time and time again that, being an athlete of a more elastic nature, the principles I’m going to list below have given me very good strength to bodyweight marks, even when I was never squatting more than once a week, and often taking weeks off entirely from the movement.
Here are 5 concepts for boosting your squat and strength-to-bodyweight ratio without overly focusing on it (especially if you are more of an elastic athlete).
- Use plyometric training and acceleration work to boost your squat
- Do more unilateral and frontal plane work to get stronger while also becoming a better mover
- Do more crouches and crawls to become stronger reflexively
- Have a baseline of extreme isometric performance ability
- When lifting, try giving yourself only 1x a week to actually train your squat (OK so this one does deviate from the narrative of the article title)
Alright, let’s get into it!
1. Use Plyometric Training and Acceleration Work to Boost Your Squat
This has been a cornerstone of my athletic performance mentality for well over a decade, and that is to use power to rise all ships if you are an explosive athlete or a “non-strength sport” athlete (I used to just say athlete here, but that was quite discriminatory to strength sports!).
Of course, this idea fits best for those of a more elastic nature. As Christian Thibaudeau speaks about, elastic athletes, or the “1B” neuro-type need to be explosive to be strong.
The “1A” type or more intensity-driven and more muscle-driven type needs to be strong and lift heavy weights to reach their highest potential, but within the scope of athletics, these athletes are still getting a ton of output via their sprints, jumps and whatever else they are doing athletically that feed into their lifting numbers, they just need to be cautious about how much plyometric and elastic work they do. For these athletes, things like heavy sled sprints are probably a better source of “strength” than a depth jump.
Ross Jeffs speaks of the spectrum of sprint athletes. On the left, Christian Coleman is a prototypical “concentric” athlete who can thrive on heavy squats, but you wouldn’t likely see them doing tons of bounding and depth jumps for training. Ben Johnson would be a similar type.
At the end of the day, for elastic athletes, a ratio of 80% dynamic work (sprinting, jumping, throwing, etc.) to 20% or so weight room and gym stuff is a good place to start. Following the “Easy Strength” ideal and not chasing numbers is important. Letting the idea of the explosiveness of the track and dynamic work rise all ships as a mentality is key.
Finally, it’s important to let Ross Jeff’s point on elastic athletes and the potential role of the weight room only as a higher-rep supplement sink in. For those who are really elastic-driven, the “1×20” mentality, or not letting the weight room eat up any CNS power at all is noteworthy. This holds the training at a polarity, where all the output work is elastic and dynamic, and all the structural work is gym oriented, but also high-rep enough to train multiple qualities.
This polarity is the basis of what I was personally doing when I started the “Science of Jumping” program at age 16 (depth jumps and 4×8 sumo deadlifts at very submaximal weights). My greatest gains on that program (+5” on my one and two-leg jumps) were definitely before the weights started to get heavy in my lifting.
2. Do More Unilateral and Frontal Plane Work to get Stronger While Being a Better Mover
If I’ve learned anything in the last 3-4 years, it’s been just how important it is to explore multiple planes of motion in a weight room situation.
Starting with Mike Boyle and the idea of a unilateral-dominant program that could still get athletes 40” vertical jumps at the NFL combine, and then branching out into other systems, such as Pat Davidson’s “Rethinking the Big Patterns” seminar, Neurokinetic Therapy and Z-Health, and noticing how particular bilateral lifts could acutely inhibit the CNS, Emergence’s course on ecological dynamics and the weight room (there is no perfect technique!), and then recently, learning from Rocky Snyder and his blending of a multitude of ideas, I’ve come to realize that once you remove your identification with bi-lateral lifts as the only true expression of strength, you can really start to help athletes thrive on an individual level.
By doing more unilateral and frontal plane work, you can balance and optimize the system in a manner that fits with the gait pattern and the spiraling nature of human movement. Is it a mystery how people can work only with kettlebells, mace-bells, or even the human body, and then come back to the weight room to break old records? It is because you are training the body in a manner that fits with how we are designed to move, balancing the body, and dis-inhibiting the nervous system from allowing us to express our true strength.
3. Do More Crouches and Crawls to Become Stronger Reflexively
If you look at human performance as a pyramid, I find that we tend to look at both weight room and dynamic outputs in a similar manner as long-term athletic development and human performance. We often look only at the “top of the pyramid” but don’t bother to look at all the bricks on the bottom.
For example, in a skill like sprinting, we could have a pyramid that has sprint speed at the top, then things like explosive strength of key movers in the second tier down from that, but below that tier would be more fundamentals, such as development of the gait pattern in early life, development of the fascial system, development of rotational capacity in the transverse plane, and more.
The first article that turned me onto this was a true classic by Roger Nelsen where he talked about how working on the basic human movements of crouching, crawling, and carrying things helped to “raise all ships”, improving his clients’ lift numbers and outputs. Coaches like Tim Anderson have furthered my sense of urgency with the importance of these qualities.
When we work on the fundamentals of our human machinery, work that resembles a child playing in a variety of ways is something we all need to be familiar with. I make a strong point to work on this in the first portion of my training sessions with university athletes, and I’ve noticed the difference in regards to injury rates, better overall athleticism, and more enjoyment on the part of the athletes.
4. Have a Baseline of Extreme Isometric Performance Ability
If you’ve been following my work, and particularly the podcast in the last few years, you’ve noticed a trend of interest in extreme isometrics as a training method that holds powerful results for athletes.
Although I’m not sure if I’ve bought in 100% on the 5-minute hold standard (I’m still figuring out the full, holistic breadth of this in an experiential manner) on the various movements, I do know that the method gives a powerful dose of muscle balance, coordination and work capacity to athletes.
I recently wrote an article for STACK on a few standards I feel athletes should be able to do before they get too wrapped up in lifting or lifting maxes, and I still hold to it. It’s also important to know that these extreme isometric holds are not actually “bracing holds” but rather extreme slow movements where the athlete slowly sinks down into the movement over time (although the hang from a bar is hard to do like this).
My standards aren’t as high as some, but I do strongly believe athletes should be able to do the following before any sort of lift 1RM enters the conversation.
- 3-minute ISO lunge
- 1-minute ISO pushup (I’d actually increase this time from the writing of that article)
- 2-minute hang from a bar
If an athlete cannot perform these activities, then the bilateral work they are doing in the weight room is likely not doing them any long-term favors.
Again, you need to build the base of the pyramid to have a better “top” to it.
5. When Lifting, Try Giving Yourself Only 1x a Week to Squat Bilaterally
I alluded to this earlier in the article, here is a lesson that’s taken me 15 years to come full circle back to.
I’ve always been fairly intuitive in my own training methods and process. I never had a formal coach or teacher to instruct me. Since I never had too many preconceived notions about training, I was able to trust my gut more often, which led to some training methods and means that were most definitely “outside the box”.
These outside-the-box notions stuck with me over time as a coach, as I often went back to reflect on them.
One thing that I seemed to always do as a young athlete was never squat bilaterally more than once a week.
Maybe it’s because I found out early in my training that it took me a few days to mitigate the soreness or negative neurological effects I had from deep squatting before I could train well again, or perhaps there was a different reason. Either way, this is something that I fell into throughout my various training routines, all the way up until my mid-20s.
I did very well on this method, having hit marks such as high jumping 7’0” as well as
Eventually, I started squatting 2x a week to fit with a few new training ideas, and it definitely worked well in the short term. I’ve trained many athletes and clients in this manner, and it gets great results. In developing a more wide-sweeping view, I like to look at long-term development and progress in light of the way our bodies are designed to move, and this has led me to doing more and more work in the past years where a bilateral weight room emphasis is done only one time a week.
In training cycles where the goal may be to really peak out the higher outputs of an athlete, then going 2x a week in a bilateral lift can be useful (or even more if you are micro-dosing or getting into factorization/easy strength approach), but my emphasis has led me to the point where I try to keep squatting to only 1x a week, generally speaking, and sometimes, staying completely unilateral. I’d highly recommend checking out the popular podcast I did with Cal Dietz, Cameron Josse, and Chad Dennis on this for more information.
Conclusion
This article is meant to be a quick reference to an ever-growing idea on my own end as a coach but ended up being rather extensive. At the end of the day, as an athlete who lives, breathes, and moves in opposition and alternation, the more time we can generally spend outside of moving in intensive bilateral work, the better. I still respect the squat, as well as the squat 1RM, and its importance does go even further than just training transfer, as it’s also a representation of the weight room and resistance training in general in a pure form, but as athletes, and coaches of high performers, we just need to keep a careful eye on how often, and how much with this potent training method, especially in light of long term performance.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is an NCAA Division I Strength Coach working in the PAC12 conference. A track coach of 11 years, Joel is also a coach for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault, and multi-events on the collegiate level.
Joel has coached 2 national champions, multiple All-Americans, and school record holders in his time as a track coach. In the realm of strength and conditioning, his programs have assisted 5 athletes to Olympic berths that produced 9 medals and a world record performance at Rio in 2016.
In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential. In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field.
Prior to working in the PAC12 conference, Joel spent 6 years in the realms of coaching, college lecturing, personal training, and thesis research. Joel’s certifications include Neurological and Physical Typing from BATI, CSCS, MAT Jumpstart, and NKT level 1, as well as USA Track and Field credentials. Joel is also well-versed in the Be-Activated protocols as taught by Douglas Heel, and has been extensively mentored by sprint and sport movement coach Adarian Barr.
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