10 questions
If these weren't decent questions that are easy to answer, I'd send this post down the road with a carrot in its ass for being too goddamn long. But here goes:
1. The distance between the bar and the wrist has to be as close to 0 as possible to shorten the lever arm against the wrist. The bar will fall out of your hand if you try to keep it vertical, so you have to carry the bar over the ends of the bones in your arm with the wrist bent just enough to accommodate this position. I find that a little pronation of the hand just before the weight is taken helps with this position.
2. The air squat is done with front squat mechanics, due to the necessity of balancing with the arms forward. This places the COM in about the same place as a light front squat, and the back angle gets vertical accordingly.
3. The line is the point at which the lever arm between the bar and the hip increases. If the back angle changes enough to increase the horizontal distance between the bar and the hip, it's too much. There should be a visible very slight change in back angle upon the initiation of the hip drive, but not very damn much.
4. There is no book that I know of that can elaborate much more on the GOMAD thing than you've already read about here.
5. Vince Gironda used to have his trainees eat 3 dozen eggs a day fried in certified raw butter, for some reason. They all lived. Juice is a glass of sugar and water, with a few vitamins. It will just make you fat. Stick with milk, meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruit and you cannot fuck up.
6. Scoliosis is bad if it's bad, not so big a deal if it's not bad. If you have been diagnosed, and if your back hurts every time you train and does not improve, you may not be able to train heavy. But Lamar Gant pulled a ~725 deadlift with severe scoliosis, so there you go. And you have to ask your doctor's permission to do anything, you have a poor understanding of the economics of this relationship.
7. Excessive, prolonged soreness is most usually a nutritional problem. Eat more, and eat more protein.
8. Yes, you should.
9. No one does a heavy squat with a perfectly motionless lordotic curve. You need to try to maintain a motionless low-back position, and that is the mechanical model. But no RM effort will be executed with absolutely perfect form -- if it was, it's not a true RM effort. Try like hell to keep it tight; if it's excessive, fix it; if it's a little round, well, you've been doing it wrong anyway and you're still okay.
10. It is possible for some people to overextend their low backs. This is due to flexibility and a lax anterior torso musculature (notice that I did not use the term "core" because I'm tired of hearing it on infomercials). The abs have to be cued and attention paid to the back position so that this does not become a problem. But really, I've never seen anyone but a rank novice do this, so I suspect that the problem fixes itself over time and before the weight gets heavy enough to kill you.
