01/04/2024
1️⃣ Drill your technique: Before adding any weight, it is important to build solid squatting technique. You should continually think about keeping your chest up, hips back, and knees in line with feet. Two drills to re-enforce these movements are wall squats and goblet squats. Another exercise to strengthen your technique is squatting with a box or bench. Stand in front of the box and squat down until your glutes touch the box. This enables you to recognize how your body feels when you are squatting to parallel.
2️⃣ Hip and ankle mobility: Good mobility is key to getting deep in your squat. Before squatting, foam roll (hip flexors, quads, lateral hips, hamstrings), stretch your hips, and mobilize your ankles. A stretch to open your hips is the ‘worlds greatest stretch’ where you go into a deep lung and reach your hand up to the sky. Another is to address the muscles in the front of our hip is a ½ kneeling hip flexor stretch. As many of us sit all day, our hip flexors and/or quads can become excessively tight. So it’s a good idea to stretch them out regularly.
To loosen up the ankles, you could do some ankle circles, toe/heel raises and massage with a lacrosse ball. Ankle flexion is also a great way to mobilize and strengthen the ankles using a resistance band as you pull your toes toward you, then point your toes down towards your heel.
3️⃣ Adjust your bar position: Adjusting the position of the barbell on your back will affect your squat. Holding the bar high up at the base of your neck requires greater mobility in your upper back, hips, and ankles to keep your chest/torso upright. Holding the bar slightly lower (mid trap) and widening your stance will decrease the amount of distance from the bar to your hips providing better leverage. This will make it easier to maintain an upright position in your squat.
4️⃣ Change your shoes: Squatting in running shoes is much more difficult than squatting in flat-soled shoes. Running shoes cause you to be more imbalanced because they lift your toes up off the ground. Try squatting in a pair of weightlifting shoes, converse or vans!