Why does Ilya half squat?

[purpledreidel]

I have seen a couple of videos of Ilya and it seems he does not squat to rock bottom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNBNsV66npk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6pQ...11m1s&t=11m00s


Why is this? How is Ilya benefiting from that type of squat?

[G1981C]

no idea, but i can guess. he focuses on clean & jerk, rather than snatch ( i think ) and on CJ people don't seem to go as deep with their ass, nor for as long a time - they seem to try to bounce right back as quickly as possible ... maybe to save the energy for the Jerk part ?

klokov seems to squat very deep, but klokov seems to be more of a snatch guy, and ilya more of a CJ guy. maybe i'm wrong.

[Grinder]

"rock bottom" is different for everyone

for ilya, he is probably going as low as he can without losing tightness.. there is no real purpose in going lower than that

[Immortal_k]

That's not even parallel. It's a half-squat.

Just goes to show that those genetically gifted are able to do sub-optimal or even down-right useless exercises and still conquer their respective sports. For everyone else under the sun, doing the same thing as they do and expecting similar results is ludicrous.

[Dastardly]

ilya does a mixture of depths for his back & front squats, often the first rep is shallower than the following. But even his shallowest squats are at least parallel, then look a lot higher because of his body proportions.

He also absolutely slams his snatches & cleans LOW LOW LOW, and he trains the lifts daily for high volume. So those lower squat positions are getting trained.

[elVarouza]

But even his shallowest squats are at least parallel, then look a lot higher because of his body proportions.

Sorry, but they're at least 2" high.

[Les Hahn]

I think a little high is ok as assistance work, as long as you are still doing normal squats to legal depth. I just started a round of paused pin squats, where I am about 1-2" above parallel. It forces you to keep your chest up when you drive off the pins like that. Same goes for board presses. A lot of guys get stronger using boards, even though it is a partial movement. If it is working for him, then why not do it. Hell, rackpulls are partials too. :-)

Now will it work for others? I don't know, but you can try and see. But I will say that just doing the competition lift all the time (without variations) 2-3x per week doesn't seem to work for everyone.

[Dastardly]

Add him on Facebook, you can see all his detailed long training sessions in Poland & Greece etc.. you really get an understanding of his training.

[purpledreidel]

"rock bottom" is different for everyone

for ilya, he is probably going as low as he can without losing tightness.. there is no real purpose in going lower than that

Ilya catches his snatches and cleans lower than his squat depth, I don't believe that it is as low as he can go without losing tightness.

[G1981C]

That's not even parallel. It's a half-squat.

Just goes to show that those genetically gifted are able to do sub-optimal or even down-right useless exercises and still conquer their respective sports. For everyone else under the sun, doing the same thing as they do and expecting similar results is ludicrous.

if top athletes had nothing except genetics their results today would have been the same as results from 10, 20, 30 years ago etc. something is changing. drugs ? steroids were around since world war 2 or so. yes, there are newer drugs now like IGF but i seriously doubt that somebody like Ilya could be doing something completely wrong for so long without anybody except youtube commenters pointing it out to him ...

squatting to different depths for variety to me sounds like a really good idea. because you won't catch the bar exactly the same way every time and you still have to make the lift.