I am in the beginnings of the Bridge and it has more squat frequency and volume than I’m used to. Which is cool. But the past few days I’ve been feeling a pain in the tip of my right elbow and a tad towards the inside. I feel like the low bar squats are the culprit although I can’t be sure 100%. Either way, I make sure my grip is fairly narrow, I make my back tight, I lift my elbows up slightly to pin the bar in my rear delta as per SS directions and then I pin my elbows to my sides, and I currently use a thumbs over SS style squat grip with straight wrists. I saw Jordan, Alan and Austin all use thumbs around grips and I’d like to give it a try to see if maybe it would help. Thing is, is there anything different I need to know when trying this? A while back I remember trying it for a few sets and I recall I couldn’t get my wrists straight with the thumbs around. I also recall not being able to get rid of the feeling of carrying too much weight in my hands and my wrists hurting. Any tips? My next squats are 303 tempos on Friday so I want to give it a shot then. Might be a good time to start since the tempo squats will be less weight than my belted squats.
I tried pretty much every grip variation you could think of when I started experiencing elbow pain in the squat. I read Jordan’s article and tried that advice. I tried advice published by Matt Reynolds and Nick Delgadillo from Starting Strength. None of the recommended grip modifications seemed to work. One piece of advice that made sense though was to carry the weight on the back not the hands. So finally I tried only placing the tips of my fingers on top of the bar. Not only does this make it impossible to carry weight in the hands, it stops my tendency to want to pull downward on the bar when I’m straining against a hard set, which was placing undue stress on my arms and elbows. So far it’s been 3 weeks of the bridge with no pain.
Wow. Thanks dude. Yeah I’ve used the traditional SS style squat for a good while with no pain. And before I started the bridge I did up to 370lbs x 2 and had no problems. Now I’m using 300 for sets on the bridge and a few hours later my elbow is a bit achy. So your saying let the back take 100% of the load. Does that mean I shouldn’t squeeze the bar when taking a thumbs around grip? I should just kind of lightly grasp it?
I can only say what worked for me. Your mileage may vary. But yes, I’d say that’s the idea. I tried thumbs around and that worked for a while, until like I said I started to want to pull down on the bar when the set got hard. Straining hard that way started exacerbating my elbow pain again. So I just tried taking my hands and arms out of the equation as much as possible. Now, I make a conscious effort to squeeze my back tight and just barely place my finger tips on top of the bar. Using the contraction of my upper back on its own to create a platform for the bar, rather than using my grip to force my back into that position. It’s not something I’ve seen written anywhere else, just something I’m trying that has seemed to work so far.
(for what it’s worth I think it was Austin who I first heard say to take the load off the hands and arms.)
One of the suggestions in that thread is to bend the bar around you. Isn’t this not what you want to do though? Isn’t that the same thing as pulling down on the bar to bend it around you which above is said to cause pain in the elbow? I
“Bending the bar” is a cue for applying pressure horizontally and not vertically.
Ahhh okay. So I should grip the bar rather firm then when using a thumbs around grip and try to bend it around me horizontally almost like pushing my hands towards the wall in front of me?
That’s idea.
I’ll give it shot and let ya know how it works out. Thanks dude!
Okay so I had GPP today. But I walked past the squat rack on the way out of the gym and figured I’d try just unracking some various weights to see how it felt. It felt awful on my wrists. Even the empty bar was very uncomfortable on the thumb side (radial?) of my wrists. I tried closer grip width, wider, nothing alleviated it. I tried a little more/less wrist flexion/extension. Nothing. Then I tried adding weight gradually up to 315 and just walk the weights out to feel it. The wrist pain kicked in bad again after about a second. It became unbearable a few more seconds after. I couldn’t imagine doing a set that way. And I’ve never had a history of any wrist pain. I’m not sure what to do here… the only way I feel comfortable with the bar on my back and the only way I really feel it “locked in” is when I’m using thumbs over. But then I get some elbow ache. And then there’s thumb around which I was excited to try thinking it’d solve my problems… Wrist ache was so bad I felt like they would eventually snap if I held like 425. I could NOT seem to get the feel of the entire weight of the bar on my back. I kept taking some in my hands, even if I leaned forward more. I even tried the “talon grip” just for the hell of it. That wasn’t a very fruitful endeavor haha
Do you have the same elbow pain with High bar?
I’ve never tried high bar. If this persists I may give it a try. Right now to be completely honest with myself on a pain scale of 1-10 it’s only about a 2. It’s just that I want to be proactive and not have something get worse enough to derail my progress so I’m trying to address it now rather than later. I think it’s weird I even have elbow discomfort with the current grip I use now being that I only experienced the discomfort at a weight that was 85lbs less than my max squat. It’s not like I was cranking on my elbows and jack I the weight up for months and months and then it hit. And also I squatted twice a week for a year that way prior with no issues. Odd. What I’m gonna do for now is get wrist straps and try the thumbs around again. I read on here that eliminates wrist discomfort with the thumbs around grip. If it is tolerable when I try on my heavy day on Monday and I’m able to progress with it then I’ll stick with it for awhile. Otherwise I’ll have to give high bar a go.
Have you recorded your squat sessions? Post a video.
I’ll do that
Okay so I got somebody to quickly film me but they were only available during my set @ 6. This was my first time trying 303 tempo squats and I’m sure I wasn’t doing them slow enough but who knows. Also I know the angle isn’t great to see my grip but it’s all I could get today. I tried thumbs around grip and used wrist wraps. This helped make the wrist uncomfortability more manageable. After this I unracked some weights up to 385 just to see how the grip felt. It definitely was not as comfortable as the thumbs over grip. Anyway, here is a set of 8 @6 with 303 tempo squats. You can see in not jacking my elbows back or moving them during the set at all but with the thumb around grip it still feels like I’m taking more of the weight in my hands than I was with the thumbs over:
Also, side note: I wasn’t sure if I should’ve used my usual thumbs on top grip for this video or not.
Art, like you said from that angle, we can’t really comment on the bar position or grip.
Your form looks pretty good but IMO your weight is a bit too much on your heels. You could let your knees travel forward a bit more as described here:
I have to work on that. Yeah I’ve been told as a cue in the past to get my knees more forward but I’m always subconsciously afraid it will put too much stress on my knees because when I learned to squat in the early SS days they were adamant about using the tubow and making sure knees didn’t go past the toes. Now I know it’s not true per se and that SS adjusted their stance on that, but it’s a mental barrier I have to break through. I’m getting better.
As for the video. I squat heavier on Monday so I’ll film a better angle. At least in the vid here you can see my elbows don’t move throughout the whole set. Like I’m not jacking them up out of the bottom or anything. Maybe Monday I’ll film a set with thumbs around and then a set with thumbs over so you can see the difference.
UPDATE: Tried a thumbs around grip and holding the bar in what I now realize is the proper position. I was holding it a tad too low ON the middle of the rear delts instead of on top of them using them as a shelf. No pain and no need for wrist wraps either. Anyone who has elbow trouble give it a try!