If you ask me, there is one movement that is the mark of a healthy and strong athlete: the deep squat.
Deep squatting ensures that you have mobility at the hips (crucial for protecting the back), as well as the ankles (immobile ankles the primary trigger for knee issues). It also trains some key muscle groups in a disadvantageous position, maximizing muscular contribution to the movement.
What is the best way to learn squatting? Reverse patterning. Know the endpoint.
When the body knows an endpoint, it can self-organize in a manner to hit that endpoint properly. Take the “toe touch”, or “bottom up” squat often seen in the warmup and corrective section of many workouts, as shown below:
There are a variety of ways to perform this movement, but the key is that athletes are finding themselves starting at the bottom of the squat, in the correct position, and work from there.
A week ago, I spent time at Paul Cater’s gym, “The Alpha Project”, where Paul and I decided to build on an idea I had about “bottom up patterning” the squat. Where I had originally wanted to train this with a harness, Paul suggested a Zercher version, which was extremely effective.
We performed each of the following squats:
- Zercher bottom ¼ squats
- Zercher bottom ½ squats
- Zercher full squats
The next day, my glutes and hamstrings were sore, but not wrecked, and my sprinting the next week felt particularly good! I also felt very strong in my squat after that series.
If you are looking to boost your strength and power in the bottom of the squat, while also getting a critical look at your mobility and function in that range, I’d strongly recommend this movement series.
The inertial rhythm of the kBox makes it particularly powerful, but this could also be done with traditional barbells into a fixed endpoint, such as two partners pushing down on the bar once you hit the ¼ squat or ½ squat position.
I’ll conclude this article with this thought, and that is I don’t think that every athlete needs to be extremely strong in the deep squat range, but they should at least be functional there, so long as their hip anatomy allows it.
Also, we do hear about “muscle slack” when doing traditional lifting movements, but, I agree with Angus Ross in that the body is smart enough to provide good muscle tension at the bottom of a heavy resisted movement. Even if muscle slack were a particular issue, doing this type of squat on an inertial machine, in theory, should eliminate much of it.
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