Squat form check

[jchristensen]

Hey guys,

For more than a decade now I've been trying and failing at getting strong at squatting, and at various points throughout that time have had long bouts of doing the program as written. These days my sets/reps are a little different, because I'm getting older and my recovery isn't as good and my L5-S1 disc is all but non-existent due to being impatient and stupid back in my early 20s.

I squat once a week now and work my way up to the heaviest set of 5 I can do, and then drop the weight back down and do 2-3 sets of 10 reps to try and reinforce technique.

My main problem with squats is that I'm wildly inconsistent. Every once in a while everything just clicks and I can feel the weight tracking over the middle of my foot, the pressure from my knees to my glutes feels even and good at the bottom of the movement, and it feels like I've got thrusters attached to my hips - but more often than not the weight just doesn't track correctly and I find myself shifting too far forward, or for whatever reason I'm inflexible on the day and I'm not hitting depth and my knees start to bark at me. In the past I've had being sloppy with allowing too much butt wink trigger a flare-up of my back pain, and so I try and be very careful about preventing that too.

I've got three clips here, one with 315 x 5 that is an example of a day when everything felt great, and two others on a day where I needed to really dig deep and suffer through my workout - one with 295 x 4, and another with 245 x 10. You can see in the second set of clips that I'm way above parallel and that the weight sometimes doesn't track correctly. The thing is that in that second clip I was feeling the glute stretch at the bottom, and so it was surprising to me to see just how high above parallel I was when I looked at the footage.

I'm hoping you can guys can help me identify what I'm doing differently between these two clips that I don't see, so that I can figure out a cue to get my squatting more consistent. I see that there is a difference, but I can't put into words what I'm doing differently.

[Mark Rippetoe]

All 5 of the set at 315 are high. Do not post above-parallel squats on these forums.

[Maybach]

I squat once a week now and work my way up to the heaviest set of 5 I can do, and then drop the weight back down and do 2-3 sets of 10 reps to try and reinforce technique

Do not do this.

[Jason Donaldson]

I squat once a week now and work my way up to the heaviest set of 5 I can do, and then drop the weight back down and do 2-3 sets of 10 reps to try and reinforce technique.

Do not do this.

To add to this sage advice from my esteemed colleague, here's the "why", Justin: The combined center of mass changes as the weight goes up. Also, sub-maximal weights allow for a lot more variance in technique from the optimal. When you drop the weight down to where you can do such a high rep range (and for sets across, at that), those two factors are conspiring against you to reinforce the wrong technique.

In all three of these videos, your depth is rather high, and they are all pretty consistent, regardless of how differently you report them feeling. Now, this is actually good news, in that it means that the feelings are not as important as you think. Your best bet at this point is to swallow your pride, back off considerably on the weight for now, and work on getting your form dialed in by the numbers. If you're close enough to a SS gym (franchise or affiliate), it's hard to overestimate the value of an in-person session with a coach. That said, there are many how-to videos on the SS channel for this. The Strength Company also just posted a very good one from their recent camp that should help you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmBPkFw27XQ