Would someone be kind enough help me with hitting depth and rocking onto toes at the bottom of my squat? It may just be a case of dropping the weight and focussing on depth and balance.
thanks,
RH
You look plenty deep in the picture. My understanding is that the hip joint needs to be below the knee for a competition lift (IPF). In the pic your hip joint looks to be about equal with the top portion of the bottom of the white stripe on your shorts. With that, I’m not a coach or a judge so take what I say for what worth. Your videos did look a little higher but not by more than an inch or 2.
On a side note, you have some crazy long tib/fibs. I’m only a few inches shorter than you but I bet you have 3 inches more shin than I do. Not sure if it effects anything, just an observation.
Thanks for the input. And yes my shins are pretty long! Apparently power lifters tend to have shorter shins compared to the general population - probably because of shorter deadlift ROM. It also makes keeping one’s ass down on a regulation bench a bit tricky.
That’s funny, I never considered the benching challenges. I’m 6’4" with a 32" in seem. My biggest problem is drowning in 2x shirts to not have plumbers crack.
It looks like you might be shifting your weight a bit forward of midfoot during the descent, onto your toes. For me, I really think about stopping my forward knee travel once they get right about over mid foot, then I think about shoving them out, directly over a lateral line drawn across mid foot. Honestly, the shoving your knees cue only seems to work for me if my femurs are externally rotated, otherwise they’re not actually making any room for hips to sit, and i end up shifting forward on my toes. So it all starts with putting the feet out at about 30 degrees and feeling my glutes rotate my femur between their hip insertion and their knee insertion, kind creating a torsion that works as a proprioceptive cue. This is all bro science-y, probably, but my point is that shoving the knees out alone on the descent is not the end all cure for shifting forward onto the toes.
Also, ditch the wrestling shoes. Invest in a good pair of lifting shoes with a raised heel. The raised heel can help with shifting onto your toes. Think: get into a “third world squat”. Is the weight up on the balls of your feet? Now put a book under your heel. Do you feel more balanced, ie, is the weight over your mid foot? Thats what a lifting shoe does.
Thanks, this was actually pretty helpful. I noticed that even when squatting light weights, I was shifting my weight onto my toes during the decent - you can see my knees shift forward at the bottom and my heels coming up.
I decided the get some proper shoes with a heel and focus on keeping the knees still once they’re in the right position and sitting inbetween my femurs to reach depth - this is what my squat looks like now.
What do you guys think?
Looks a lot better – your heels are staying firmly on the ground. Pretty amazing what shoes do for your technique huh? I remember the difference when I switched from chucks.
“Sitting in-between femurs” is a good way of putting it. I’ve never had a session with an SS coach, but that sounds like a decent cue.
Yep, shoes plus a couple of cues. I actually found Rip’s article on the squat mechanics to be quite useful:
“Both mistakes involve too much knee movement. Moving knees leak hip power. The correct movement is “all” hips. Specifically thinking about holding the knees still at the bottom while “bouncing” off the hips behind you can be a good cue to fix this. Placing the knees where you want them as you set the back angle half-way down, holding them tight, and driving up with the hips can correct both problems. The knees will move a little, but the idea is for them to move just enough, at the right time, by focusing on force production at the hip, facilitated by “frozen knees,” or “tight shins,” or whatever cue works best for you.”
It’s strange, I’m only just hitting depth but these squats feel about a foot deeper than before.
The second video looks alot better, it almost looks like your getting off balance to me… and I think that would be you looking so close in front of you. Try to look out a tad bit more if you have the space in that room