First Squat Form Check

[Robertus]

I had this posted in my training log, but I figured this may be a better place for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUFrrMK23MI

This is my 3rd set of 255lbs. Yes, it is a high-bar squat. I've been working on low-bar squats in my warm-ups, and trying to move more weight with it. I'm still not that quite comfortable with them, but I'm sure that's due to 8 years or so of high-bar stuff.

What I notice is a curved bar path, and long intervals between reps.

Any comments?

[JayvH]

Knees are traveling forward through the whole descent, read the part about the TUBOW in the book.

[Jason B]

That's gotta be the longest set of 5 I've ever seen in my life. The first few did not look hard at all yet you wait a good 10 seconds between each rep. Get tight before you get under the bar, take one step back, get your air and go. There's no need to rush, but man you take a long time in the beginning and between reps. As your weights go up it will get very taxing to have the bar on your back that long.

[Tom Campitelli]

I'm not an expert on high bar squats and I would venture that many of the people here probably fall on the low bar end of things. With that in mind, your knees are doing funny things, especially on the later reps. You can see your hamstrings give way toward the bottom and your knees slide forward in a very pronounced way. The block of wood trick (TUBOW) is not quite as applicable for high bar squats since the knees will travel forward further than with low bar. Check out Aimee Anaya here:

http://cathletics.com/wod/video/aimeeBSHeavySingle.mov

Her knees come in a little on her ascent during high bar squats, but I suspect that is deliberate. Much like with low bar, her knees come forward early in the movement and then stay pretty well planted thereafter. She also stays very upright and has minimal torso angle change on the ascent.

I think you need to work on staying more upright and driving less with the hips and more with the chest. The knees need to come forward father and earlier. Hip drive and high bar squats don't really mix much. Your quads will drive the squat more than the posterior chain. Check out Aimee's quads in that video. They are big and well muscled. If squatting like this starts to hurt your knees, well, that's why Rip recommends low bar squats.

Please read the next bit of advice and realize I am not trying to be a dick whatsoever. Seriously, I am not. End disclaimer. If you have been training high bar squats for 8 years and you are still working with 255 lbs, there is a problem. Perhaps you are injured, or something else is going on. However, you should take a look at your training and figure out what is going on the hold up progress on the squat.

[Tom Campitelli]

One other thing. Catalyst Athletics has a big video archive of people doing high bar squats and the Oly lifts. Some have good form and some are shaky. Dig in and check them out. Everett and Rippetoe don't agree on some details of the lifts, but if it's high bar you want, http://cathletics.com/gallery/index.php?section=video is where you want to go.

[Robertus]

Thanks for all the advice. I knocked the weight down to 225, and switched to a lower bar position to see what difference I feel. I immediately noticed that my upper thigs were much more engaged in the exercise. I took video, and will be posting shortly.

The 8 years of training piece I mentioned was not, of course, steady squat training, but the regular back-arms-shoulder-legs split style routine where I never really trained squats consistently, but did it enough to work in a few habits. One of those habits is the high-bar placement. Switching to a lower bar yesterday felt very awkward.

I'm concerned with my form at this point, as I feel like I could keep progressing to heavier weights, but do not want to do so with poor form.

[Tom Campitelli]

More excellent examples of high bar squatting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_jxTc2ITA8&NR