Which squat depth is correct? (and shoulder pain FIXED)

[DannyP]

Tried cutting off depth a little today, to see how it impacted knee movement. This set had the "cut-off" depth (first two reps) and then my "normal" depth (last three).

YouTube

Knees still slide, but I almost don't care, since I finally figured out how to fix the shoulder pain. Turns out I was approaching the bar wrong: when I'd initially "make contact" I'd let my back muscles be loose, so I could then tense them to "grip" the bar. Today I tried approaching the bar already flexed, creating the right "shelf" and 95% of the pain was gone.

[Mch64961]

My two cents; something between the two would probably be perfect, first ones were ehhhhhhh. And start caring about the knee slide- it makes things harder than they need to be. Some advice I received that works really well is to use TUBOW on your warm ups.

[Jeremy Tully]

Tried cutting off depth a little today, to see how it impacted knee movement. This set had the "cut-off" depth (first two reps) and then my "normal" depth (last three).

YouTube

Knees still slide, but I almost don't care, since I finally figured out how to fix the shoulder pain. Turns out I was approaching the bar wrong: when I'd initially "make contact" I'd let my back muscles be loose, so I could then tense them to "grip" the bar. Today I tried approaching the bar already flexed, creating the right "shelf" and 95% of the pain was gone.

The first two are fine, at least for training. Just don't go any higher than these. You'd also want to get lower in a meet, since you'd be asking for red lights if you're just barely getting depth.

The bigger issue here is that you are staying too vertical with your back angle. You need to commit to a more horizontal back angle and staying back in your hips more. That will help you clean up the knee slide, too.

[DannyP]

Thanks, appreciate the direction on depth (particularly as it relates to recreational training; I'm not a competitor)!

And I didn't literally mean I don't care about knee slide issues, rather that all else was relatively unimportant yesterday having finally found a fix to the incessant shoulder pain that would come with squatting. Now that I have figured that out, I'll be in a better position to play around with things like torso angle.