Reply With Quoteyou should break down and buy the book.
Hip Drive...?
I cant really get this hip drive concept to work. What i understood from SS:BBT is that hip drive is to basically keep your chest up and lead with your hips. I didnt really understand that so i looked in the Starting Strength Wiki for hip drive tips. According to that, you need to curl your toes up and then go up. This ensures hip drive but my toes are not strong and basically start burning in pain when i do this. Is there any way for me to successfully do this hip drive?
Here are a couple videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY5L6qGnOZw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOXULUR4PMA
Thanks.
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you should break down and buy the book.
i have it.Originally Posted by misspelledgeoff
Member
Holy Crapola, you are the most flexible dude I have ever seen.
The Active Hip article (look in the tab on the left) describes the hip drive in detail.
The important things are to push knees out so you can get rebound of inner thighs, get external rotators on out thighs to contribute and have a position where hip movement is totally unobstructed either in the joint or you stomach hitting thigh.
When you get the position right you should be able to get a good stretch rebound and be able to get even tension and input from all the muscles of the hip.
Your low back must obviously stay tight throughout, but for you that should be very easy.
Oh and, the toes up cue is just for preventing people from unweighting the heels. You can try it temporarily of you have this problem. But it is not something that will help hip drive directly. Pointing knees out will.
Last edited by Dastardly; 01-20-2010 at 08:51 PM.
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FWIW you demonstrate good hip drive in the videos you posted.
-Stacey
What i noticed are that my knees are sliding forward and im doing a small good morning to get the weight up. Should i drop te weight to fix ths because 170 @ 3 x 5 is hard as hell.
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A slight change in back angle is acceptable. If it gets out of control, and you start experiencing a rather dramatic change in back angle, it might help to think about leading with the chest coming up out of the bottom position. You can also try Gary Gibson's cue of driving the traps into the bar as you start to rise out of the hole.
The knees sliding forward: you've got to focus on shoving the knees out. It may help to exaggerate the knees-out cue for yourself mentally. Think about trying to "split the crotch of your shorts" by shoving your knees out, or think "touch the walls on either side of me" as you do this. Do this while maintaining the weight evenly across the bottom of your foot and looking down.
-Stacey
Member
I would go so far as to say a slight change in back angle is often a decent way to tell if one "has" hip drive. Especially if you're a beginner working with relatively light weights. Your squats look fine. Keep paying attention and they'll improve just like your strength.
Member
I think these squats look pretty damn good, except for the fact that your knees are moving forwards for the entire duration of the squat. The knees should do all of their forward travel in the first third of the descent, so focus on moving them forwards as soon as you start your descent and I think you'll be fine.
As for the hip drive thing: you look like you've got good hip drive. You do tend to raise the hips too fast on some of your reps, but it's not really ruining your squats. I find that my sticking point in the squat occurs just above parallel, because this is the point where it takes a lot of effort to both drive the hips up and to maintain the back angle. By knowing that this is where my sticking point occurs, and by focusing hard at this point during the squat on maintaining my back angle while I drive my hips up, I get past it with good form and without goodmorninging (?). Hope this helps.
✓ Member
You biggest problem is that you are terribly underweight. By terribly underweight, I mean you need to gain about 40 pounds. This will help your squats like nothing else. You need to really concentrate on taking in about 6,000 calories a day. Not 2,000. Not 3,000. 6,000. I believe you mentioned before that you were a vegetarian. If this is still the case, you just made things a lot harder. You need protein and lots of it. Lots of fat, too. The GOMAD diet with whole milk will be essential here.
I used to be skinny. 6'2", 172 lbs. It was horrifying. I now weigh 220. Life is much better and so are my squats. Get bigger. Eat. Lots. It will be mildly uncomfortable at first. If it were easy everyone will do it.
Lastly, your squats look decent. You are going a bit too low, which may account for some of the forward knee travel at the bottom.
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