For Personal Trainers

How to properly do a squat : Squat Technique Guide for trainers

What’s the REAL difference between wide squats versus close stance squats…

In this video I am going to show you how to properly do a squat, proper squat technique for fitness trainers! Some basic concepts that can improve personal training quality for every personal trainer. You see there are lot of professional and experts out there telling you this exercise does this, this exercise does that. The main that you need to understand is pure bio mechanics. It all breaks down to physics and force diagrams.

What you can learn from this proper squat technique!

 

When you understand this concepts you can basically look at any exercise and understand 1) What stress or what emphasis is placing upon your body 2 with a little bit deeper understanding you can figure out if that exercise is safe for your body.

 

What this does is allows your to see exercises in a deeper level, more than being just you know, what muscles are being emphasis, what muscles are being worked. But what forces and in what directions is that happening.

 

So I will go into, let’s say squat and different variations of the squat and this way we can understand why certain stances emphasizes certain parts of your gluts or quads. So first thing I am going to do is a wide squat. So you can imagine, someone goes wide and squats down. The two things you want to look for is, what are the joints the access to pivot points right?

 

How our joints, in this case knee joint works

 

If you have a seesaw the pivot point is where the seesaw is touching the bottom. So you wanna look at like what joints are involved in this movement. The two joints that are moving is off course is your knee and your hip joint. They are both flexing at the same time when you do a squat, so depending upon how my body is positioned that dictates if its working the quads more or the hips more.

 

So let’s give you a side view so that you can understand what’s happening. If I have my feet closed and squat down with my upper body pretty upright. What is happening is that my center of mass, my trunk as I am going down is pretty close to my hip, another way of saying is that it is far away from my knee joint.

Proper squat technique for wide squat

 

In a wide squat, if I squat down like this and if I stay in an ideal squat position my center of mass is closer to my knees versus this position which is further from my knees. This means closer, if you draw a vertical line down the distance to my knee right would be about here versus a close squat now it’s a much further distance.

 

Now these distances mean everything, the reason of wide squat when you go down like this works your hip more as I am getting my body more forward, every inch that is going forward is taking more stress on the knees and less to the knees and if I lean back it’s the opposite.

 

So literally this controls what body parts that you are emphasizing. Quads or the hip because I am like shifting my center of mass closer or further away from my pivot points. So if you are upright close like this, my body weight further away from my knee. If I now lean forward more now its going to work my hips more and my quads less.

 

You can feel this literally. If you are doing on your own, if you squat down and keep upright feel what’s burning, your quads. If you lean forward now feel what’s burning its going to be more your gluts. This transition of your centre of mass dictates what muscles are working.

 

What you learned from the above proper squat technique you can apply this to any exercise. If you are doing a bicep curl. At the very top you keep it like this. Now the weight is here, you pivot point is your elbow, it is pretty far from your elbow, vertically. Now if you end up in a bicep curl like this now the joint and the weight going down is pretty close to elbow.

 

Very little resistance on the bicep. If you do a side lateral, if you kind of bent your elbow versus bending the elbow this literally doubles the distance to your shoulder joint versus being bent. This, let’s say you have 10 pounds of resistance. 10 pounds here is like 20 pounds when you extend the elbow. So if you are trying to work the shoulder that’s going to add more resistance more pressure to the shoulder.

 

Read More: Why avoid Wall Squat

 

Bio Mechanics is everything!

 

So understanding the concept of leverage and looking into bio mechanics of physics can mean everything in help you understand what exercises are doing what.

 

It’s all about leverage. Having full understanding of the physics behind the movement allows you to create better movements and safer exercises for your fitness clients.

Healthy knees with this proper squat technique

 

If you want to keep your knees healthy and you workout just for a healthy strong body, avoid squatting too low (below 70 degrees), follow this proper squat technique. The typical recommendation of squatting to parallel or “butt to the ground” is just not healthy.
Below are two studies to prove this point:

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19276845

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11949662

 

These studies also prove why you don’t want to do wall squats. A wall squat on both legs produces more knee cap stress than a one leg squat!

 

The only tie you would want to squat low is if you are an athlete and your sport requires you to be in that deep squat position. Working out for vanity is NOT the same as working out for performance. The recent trend is to maximize both, but you can’t.

 

Vanity is about making muscles work as hard as possible to burn calories and built / tone muscles. Therefore you lift in way to make the weight feel as heavy as possible by maximizing the lever arm.

 

For athletes working out for performance, it the exact opposite. Athletes want to make the weight feel as light as possible and minimize the lever arm. This will allow the athlete to work harder and longer without fatigue.

 

 

What is dangerous exercises epidemic epidemic

With new workout exercise being invented daily, how do you know what technique is correct? Exercises that have been around for a long time like squats, bench press, deadlifts, etc… have extensive studies on how to move through those exercises, what stresses the joints, which muscles to focus on, and most importantly, what NOT TO DO.

Watch this video to learn more about this dangerous exercises epidemic.

 

 

We will talk about dangers of exercises that are common around gyms, dangerous exercises such as wall slide squat where lean back on the wall and slide down. Dangerous Exercises like upright rows where you grab a dumbbell and do upright row in front of your body. And also bench dips where you put your arm behind you put on a bench and dip up and down.

 

These are very common exercises done in professional gyms that are not painful while you are doing them but overtime will degenerate your body much faster than healthy exercises. At bodysolutions we are all about health.

The list of dangerous Exercises

 

First let’s talk about wall squats. I call it the lipsy trainer squat meaning when someone shows you squat and can’t get it, okay let’s go over to the wall, lean back, legs forward just slide up and down. Very easy you get great burning in your quads, you get a good workout. The drawback to that is mechanics of that exercise does work your quads a lot, almost 100%.

 

But it works your butt and hamstrings 0%, what happens when we have 100% contraction on quads and 0% on hamstrings which is totally admirable in daily functions. Your knee now wants to slide when you create fiction when you go up and down. This friction causes degeneration, basically wear and tear on your knee. Over time, it may not hurt. A day, a week or a month or over year but your knee will degrade faster for doing little conventional healthy functional squat.

 

Second exercise is upright row, taking a weight and doing this motion. Your arm is being internally rotated and your arm is going out to the side. It is a horrendous exercise because you are literally manually pinching bones together in shoulder.

 

There is a test that we do in physical therapy where we take your arm and do this upright row motion to see if this painful. The reason we do that for as we know there is two bones that are smashing against each other while we do that movement. Now when you do that with resistance the intensity of that smash is even higher the more that we do.

 

When we first hear things like rotator cuff tear, basically if you continue to smash those bones together you damage the soft tissues in your shoulder that are designed to help hold your shoulder together. That’s a pretty bad exercise and I recommend that you avoid it.

 

And the last exercise is the bench dip where your arms are behind your, your legs in front, where you dip down to work your triceps. The drawback to this that our shoulders are only designed to go back for about 30 degrees. So if I hold my shoulder blade, this is it, it cannot go any further. If you go any further you make this a dangerous Exercises.

 

But when you dip you will go further than the 2 inches, you are going to do all the way down. And what happens is your shoulder blades tilts forward and rotate with tremendous stress. And the joint that takes the beating is called the AC joint.

 

It happens to you if you are lifting for a long time, if you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s you will notice a bump on that joint and it’s a sign of degeneration of that joint. Years of wear and tear. You were taking that joint and grind in with every repetition.

 

Another exercise which is very popular in commercial gyms but if poorly done could be dangerous, harmful. As you studied bio mechanics, how the body works you will quickly realize that there are lot of exercise done in commercial gyms that are not developed by people who studied how to move your body. They just done because they felt good, you know you feel the burn. The burn that you feel is does worth the exercises but there are so many better ways to work out the muscles that are healthier for your body.

 

That’s what we do at bodysolutions.

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