Why you need to stop squatting (video)
By aamover | October 23rd, 2009
If you coach athletes, you have them squatting in
the weight room.
Squats are a core lift in any respectable strength
training program.
At least they were.
I’m cutting them from my program. And you should
too.
(If the thought of cutting squats out of your program
doesn’t blow your mind on some level, then your
current strength training program probably isn’t
very good.)
Watch this video from strength and conditioning
legend Mike Boyle and discover exactly *why*
the squat is dead:
http://tinyurl.com/DeathofSquat
To your success,
Latif Thomas
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Speed Training . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I haven’t seen FSC 3, so I don’t know all of Mike’s reasons for dropping bilateral squats. However, I don’t think that unilateral squats have any advantage in building leg strength. If I remember correctly, the idea is that back strength limits the weight one lifts when squatting, which means it’s not as effective for building strength in the legs. I have a different way of looking at it. In my personal experience, the back is not the limiting factor in the squat because it is weaker than the legs, but because it is stronger. As I move closer to my max, the tendency is to let the hips rise early and let the trunk incline further forward, shifting the emphasis off the legs to the stronger area, the back. I can lift more weight in this fashion than I can if I focus on keeping the angle of my torso constant throughout the lift and force the legs to lift the load. It’s not weakness that causes the back to “give” as I rise out of the deep position of the squat. If it was, I’d never finish the lift, because as the back “gives” it goes into a position that puts it at even more of a mechanical disadvantage. I should not be able to recover from this position if it was caused by back weakness, but (usually) I do recover. This indicates that the back goes into a position of poor leverage for a reason other than weakness. I believe that reason is to help get the legs through their sticking point in the lift. When I get to a weight where my back finally fails to finish the lift, I’m already well above the weight I can do while maintaining a constant back angle throughout the lift. So here’s my point: the back may limit the maximum weight you can lift in the squat, but the legs limit the weight you can lift in the squat WITH GOOD FORM. My solution is not to find another lift, but to focus on perfect form, every rep of every set. I think my form should look the same when I’m squatting 95% of my max as it does when I’m doing my warmup sets. When I do that, the squat most definitely is more of a leg exercise than a back exercise. Also, in the video Mike says that 145 for 14 reps in the single leg squat equates to 290 for 14 in the regular squat. This does not take into account the fact that the elevated leg is also contributing to the lift. Personally, I’m not sure that it really matters which kind of squats you do. The weight room is for building strength, not mimicking sports movements. We build strength, then apply it to sports movements through drills and practice. I seriously doubt that there is significant neurological carryover from any form of squatting to running. Squatting helps improve performance because of increased strength, but it does little/nothing for others aspects of performance such as muscle sequencing and intermuscular coordination.