 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's number one fitness, health and entertainment podcast, we talk all about how to go from the couch to full, deep, comfortable and strong squats. Now the barbell squat or squats in general, one of the most effective exercises you could do for your whole body, regardless of your goals. Whether you wanna burn body fat, build muscle in your legs, sculpt and shape your body, squatting is a fundamental human movement and it's a skill, it's one that you lose if you don't practice it. Now, you may already have problems with squatting. You might find you can't go down below 90 degrees, you have knee pain or back pain. If you can't squat properly, you're gonna wanna listen to this episode because we tell you exactly how to go from where you're at now to getting beautiful, amazing squats in as little as potentially 90 days. We break it all down for you from the first 30 days, the second 30 days to the third 30 days. Now we do mention in this podcast an assessment that Justin takes Doug through. You can actually follow along and learn how to assess your body so you know what movements to do for your body so you can squat better. It's totally free, it's a free service we provide to all of our listeners. It's called mapsprimewebinar.com. So just go to mapsprimewebinar.com and watch the self-assessment. Watch the assessment, apply it to yourself. Listen to this episode and in 90 days you will greatly improve your ability to squat fully with no pain and amazing strength. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Paleo Valley. Paleo Valley makes some of the best grass-fed meat sticks you'll find anywhere along with other supplements. They have organ complex supplements, they have a turmeric supplement, they have vitamin C complex. Lots of their products are amazing but our favorite's the meat sticks. These are grass-fed jerky sticks that are not dry. They taste really, really good. High in protein, healthy fat. In fact, it's one of my favorite snacks, period. It blows all the other jerkeys and meat sticks products out of the water. And because you listen to Mind Pump you get 15% off your first order. So go check them out, paleovali.com that's P-A-L-E-O-Valley.com forward slash Mind Pump and get 15% off. And by the way, if you wanna check out some of our workout programs we have a lot of them. You can find all of them and find the one that works for you at mapsfitnessproducts.com. We recently did a quaw where we talked and someone asked a question about squats and it actually brought up I think a really good conversation with the three of us and reminded me, I don't know if it brought you guys back to probably one of the number one things I had to overcome as a trainer. It was getting a client who had some sort of back issue or something and then they came in and their doctor had told them they shouldn't squat and so they were just, they were absolutely afraid to squat or learn how to squat or to get due deep squats because they had been told they have a bad back and so I spent a majority of my time trying to overcome that and that conversation led us talking off air about just how important that is that somebody learns how to squat but what if you're in a place where you don't have good squat mechanics, you don't have good mobility, how would we take a client like that in the course of just a couple months and get them to a place where they could actually squat? Right, before we even get into that, it's like why the squat? Why is a squat so important? Why is there so much value placed on that particular movement? It is a fundamental human movement, the ability to squat down. It highlights mobility and strength throughout most of your body, including the upper body. A lot of people don't realize that it does require good squats, especially barbell squats, require good upper body mobility as well. It's safe to say if you can do a good squat with good control, good full squat with good control and good stability and good strength, that you probably generally are pretty good. You're pretty well off. Then on top of that, because it's a, and this is true for all kind of fundamental human movements, once you're good at it and you work on strengthening it, the payback is tremendous. The time that is needed to spend on a squat, on a good squat in order to elicit good results is less than you would need to spend on other exercises. In other words, and I'll just make up a number here, you may need to do five other exercises or more to equal what you would get from just the barbell squat or just from the squat. So it's a very important exercise in like all fundamental movements or the ways we move, they are skills, a squat is a skill and you can lose that skill. Just like if you were to stop walking for a long period of time, you would lose the ability to walk, you'd have to relearn it. Squatting, although it is a fundamental human movement, if you don't do full squats and you do them comfortably with good mobility and good strength, you lose that ability. So in that case, yes, just going and squatting will hurt you. Yes, it will hurt your back. Yes, it will hurt your knees, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't squat. What it means is you should work towards the point where you can squat and figure out why you're unable to squat. Yeah, I feel like squat is such a good measure of a snapshot in time of how your body is performing properly from every facet, every joint, getting everything to work in unison. And it's one of those things that once you think that you've mastered it, and like you said, you can lose this as a skill just by not doing it frequently enough. So this is why we're always bringing it up. It's just something that if you notice it in the gym and you know somebody that has a really good squat, you know how long it took for them to even get to that point. And so, you know, to be able to take somebody to the very start in the beginning and go through that process in the most effective way possible, I think is a very valuable thing to understand. Totally, I had never, so I started working out very consistently at a young age and it wasn't until I started barbell squatting that I saw my body really respond and that responded very quickly. And I learned it from a group of power lifters at a gym that I was working out in. Now, up until that point, I did work out my legs. I did things like leg presses and hack squats and leg extensions and leg curls, but they convinced me to do barbell squats and I practiced them, got decent at them and saw my body progress tremendously. I saw this with my clients as well. There's almost no exercise I can think of that produced results in my client. And honestly, it doesn't even matter what the goal was, whether it was fat loss, building muscle, shaping the glutes, improving mobility, athletic performance, I saw in my clients the greatest payback from any single exercise it was from, the barbell squat. So it's a tremendously valuable exercise. That's why it's so important to not just learn how to do this skill, get your body to be able to do it but also be able to maintain that skill. I wish that I was more passionate about this when I first started as a trainer. This didn't really come full circle for me until later in my career when I started to battle low back pain, bursitis in my hips and realized that where I was missing was not training myself to get a deeper, fuller range of motion. I was limiting my range of motion on my squat. I was focused more on the way I looked and aesthetics, although I practiced this with my clients and we always talk on the show about we were better trainers with our clients than we were ever ourself. This is a classic example of that with squatting. I just, I did not put the energy and effort towards working on my mobility. And as I got older and even though I got more buff looking, I started to deal with chronic issues. My ankles were bothering me, my hips were bothering me, my low back was bothering me and I had this chronic pain. And I didn't realize how much of that had to do with my inability to do a full range of motion squat. And of course, now looking back, it makes total sense, right? You know, the hips are such a multifaceted joint that can move in all these different planes. And when you limit it, you know, to this 90 degrees all the time, sitting in a chair, sitting in your car, sitting at your desk and never challenging the hips to open all the way up into this full range of motion, what ends up happening is the body starts to compensate. Other muscles start to compensate and this is where the problems start to arise. And then it started to make sense to me why I had so many of these clients that wanted to avoid squats because oh, my low back hurt or my hips bother me or I have bursitis. And I probably allowed more of those clients to get away with that in my earlier career. It wasn't until later did I realize, oh my God, the answer for these people is for me to really work on their mobility in these joints and get them to a place where they can full squat because what I experienced now, which is amazing is I don't have to do a lot of the mobility work anymore. All I have to do is deep squat. As long as I have really good deep squats in my routine every week, it keeps my ankles healthy. It keeps my knees healthy. It keeps my hips healthy. It keeps my low back healthy because I put the work in to get there. And that in itself is a reason to work towards that even if you think that you can't do it right now because it may take a little bit of work to get there. But once you get there, it's actually a lot easier to sustain that joint health by doing exercises that take the joints through its full range of motion. Yeah, it's funny when they do studies on the impact of singular exercises on things like hormones, for example. So they'll do tests, well, they'll see, because when you lift weights and you do it properly, you do see a spike in anabolic hormones, things like testosterone and growth hormone. And they can actually, they've actually done this where they've done exercises and then measured the response. And the number one exercise for spikes in things like testosterone and growth hormone, especially in men, was the barbell squat. The other exercises didn't even come close. They also can test things like muscle protein synthesis. So protein synthesis, when it's positive, it's telling you that the body's building new tissue. And they can measure this in real time. They can have you work out, measure it and see what's going on. Again, the squat is king. When they look at metabolism, calories burned, calories burned after exercise. Again, the barbell squat or the squat is king. Now it is important, I know Adam's talking about full squats, it is important to differentiate the difference between a partial squat and a full squat. Totally different exercises. We're talking about full squats here. A partial squat, although there's some value in some maybe specific sports, it's not what I'm talking about right now. What I'm talking about is a full range of motion squat. This is where you go all the way down. You actually go down below 90 degrees, your hips go lower than your knees and you can get in that position comfortably. And then, you know, if you're strong, you can load that weight, that position and do repetitions there. Totally different exercise from a partial range of motion squat. Now here's the deal. I know for some people, squats have a bit of a reputation for causing injury and pain. If you can't squat properly, if you don't have the mobility, if you don't have the strength, you will hurt yourself. By the way, that's true for all exercises. If you don't have the strength and stability, range of motion to do a curl, you're gonna hurt yourself. It doesn't matter what the exercise is. If your body can't do it and you don't have the skill to do it, then yes, you will hurt yourself. So that's, and I wanna make sure we hammer that home, that what we're talking about in this podcast today is how to get to the point to where you can squat fully with good control and good strength so you can reap the benefits of one of the most effective exercises, no demand, with minimal or no risk of injury or pain. And if anything, it'll reduce your pain. In fact, it was one of the most effective exercises for my older population clients. It was a squat. When I got them to be able to squat and then do squats, pain would go away. That's how powerful of an exercise this is. Now, I know in this episode, we're talking about 90 days to be able to get a full squat. I think that's a safe number for most healthy, able-bodied individual. But again, and one more caveat, there are a lot of individual variances. So do not try to force yourself to fit in this structure that we're talking about. In other words, if we're saying from couch to deep squat in 90 days, and you're at the end of 90 days and you're still like, you know what, I still need to work on mobility. I still am not feeling very stable in the bottom position. Don't force yourself, listen to your body. But I think it's safe to say that for most people who are relatively healthy, who are able-bodied, who are void of major pain or injury, 90 days is pretty safe. I can get most people in 90 days, if not getting to do a full squat, I can get them much better off than they were before with the right approach. Well, the reason why this is one of the most powerful or effective movements that anybody can do is also because of how nuanced it is. So there's a lot of common breakdown when somebody squats. And because it can be so complex, I think is why so many people avoid it or why doctors many time will tell clients that have back pain or knee pain or chronic pain somewhere in their body that, oh, you should just not do squats because it's so nuanced. Because it's not as simple as, oh, watch someone do it, then turn right around and perform it. If you have, you know, excessively forward head or forward shoulders, there's a good chance when you go down and do a squat, you're gonna have this forward lean. Your body's gonna fold over like a lawn chair when you go in and the weight's gonna end up being distributed over the top of your knees and you might feel stress in your low back. You might feel stress in your neck. Super common, you know, or somebody doesn't know how to break at the hips. And so a lot of the load is, the stress is going into the knees where they don't have the ankle mobility. And so they don't have a lot of travel for the knees to go back and forth. Or their hips, they get stuck at a certain point because they don't have the hip mobility because there's so many areas in the squat that you can break down. And it's common that somebody has at least one, two, if not all of those areas to address. It seems so overwhelming that people avoid it. But the truth is once you figure out what those areas that you are breaking down in and then you do the right things to improve it, you should see progression in this. Like you said, Sal, over 90 days, maybe you don't have a perfect, maybe you don't go from the couch to the most beautiful squat around in 90 days, but you absolutely can make huge strides in 90 days to the improvement of that squat. And this is where I actually do find a lot of value in a standardized approach in terms of something that, you know, you can try to achieve whatever variance that looks like so that you might not be as exact as, you know, what you set out for in terms of like what your squat looks like because of your levers and because of these different factors. But there's a lot of conflicting information out there that's really trying to cater towards, you know, pulling you in and making things easier for you, which this isn't the message that you're gonna get from us today. This is more of work towards these things in order to get your body in better alignment and to get things to function your joints to go through the range of motion that your body is set up to do. And so this is something that, you know, I'm passionate about in terms of, you know, trying to make sure that if we can establish this one specific technique in your foot position, your knees, everything kind of like stacking on top of that first, then we can venture out. We can go a little bit wider in our sense. We can mess with that. We got to establish a standard first. Yeah, there's this, I'm so glad you said that. There's this common belief and it's largely false that because everybody's body's different, everyone's squat is gonna look different. To some extent, there's a little bit of truth to that, but with like all fundamental human movements, for example, you know, you walk, you watch someone who's tall versus someone who's short. If they've got good mechanics, male, female, and they walk, walking kind of looks the same. You can tell when someone has good mechanics when they walk versus when they don't. The same thing is true for a squat. Good squats look similar. Bad squats look very different from each other, okay? So yes, if you squat very different from your friend, maybe because you have most, probably because you have mobility issues and some strength and stability issues. But when you look at a bunch of people, tall, short, medium, you know, male, female, doing really good squats with good mobility, good stability, good strength, they all look very, very similar. So let's move away from the whole like, oh, my body's different, I can't squat, or I have to do this crazy variation because my hip joints or whatever, usually that's not the case. It's usually not the case. It's usually a mobility issue. And if you address those issues, you'll find that your good squat will look very similar to somebody else's very, very. You know, that's become really popular. I'm glad you addressed that too, Justin. You know who just, Kelly Starrett. So shout out to him. He did a video just recently on his Instagram. I thought that was really good to kind of debunk this because that's become very popular, especially in the CrossFit community. This like open-toed stance, like, oh, this is normal. It's because my hips are this way. And then what he does is in the video, he sits everybody down in a chair. He goes, everybody sit down in a chair right now. He goes, okay, point your toes straight. Like everybody does it. He goes, okay, your hips are not limiting you. You can squat like that. Yeah, you can squat like this. If you could sit down in a chair and turn your toes in, sitting in this position, you should be also to be able to squat. Your hips, if they were the limiting factor, if your anatomy was your limiting factor to you turning your feet in, you would not be able to do that in this chair. No, 100%. So I love addressing that. So I mean, so let's talk about the first 30 days. Like what are we doing with a client when they first walk in the door and they're saying, hey, I've never really squatted before. I wanna get good at squatting. What does that first 30 days look like? Well, number one, you gotta do an assessment. So we have to look at the whole body to identify where there may be some potential issues because a squat, especially a barbell squat uses the entire body, especially when you have a barbell on your back, right? You have to hold the barbell there. You have to have good posture in the upper back. If things go wrong with the upper part of your body that tends to affect the lower part of your body, then you have the middle of your body, core stability, the stability around your spine. You have your hips, you have your knees, you have your ankles, your feet. So you really wanna do a full self-assessment. Now, for those of you listening who have no idea what that looks like, we actually have a free assessment that you can go, course you can go take, it's totally free. It's called mapsprimewebinar.com. If that's correct, Doug, am I right? Mapsprimewebinar.com and you'll go on there and then Justin actually takes Doug, Doug is the model in there through an assessment and we broke the body up into zones. Zone one being kind of the upper body, zone two being the middle of the body, zone three being the lower part of the body. But when you do this assessment, here's what you're looking for. Do you have bad posture? Do your shoulders roll forward? That's very common. Do you have poor stability in your core to where when you do a squat, your tailbone tucks really deep and you can't maintain that tight core position. Do your ankles or your heels come up off the floor when you try a squat? Do your feet have to turn out? Do your knees move in or move out or do they just lose stability where they kind of wobble? Pay attention to all those things and find where you see kind of the breakdown. You can look at a perfect squat online, compare yours to it and see where the differences are. So now this is a very specific thing. When I do an assessment, I'm looking at an individual but I'm gonna give you some general exercises that will help the most common, I'd say posture issues. Yeah, let's go through those three zones and talk about the most common issues and then the ways to fix that first because there are definitely, although there's always gonna be an individual variance, there's always gonna be an exception to rule, there's always gonna be that client who has one limb who's two inches longer or we wanna talk to them. We're talking about the most common things we see. Yeah, the most common things you see and if you go from zone one where Sal talked about, that's the upper body, that first zone, the most common things that I have seen is a forward shoulder and a forward head. And that's just simply because we do everything in front of us, we type like that. And that's where the shoulders round forward and that's where the head- The head protrudes forward, yeah, it chins out. It's like what generation Z looks like because they're always on the computers and stuff. So it's that forward position and that's gonna make it really hard for you to squeeze your shoulders black and support a barbell on your back and maintain upright posture. Just gonna put a lot of neck strain as well with your head all the way out that direction. And also, yeah, and you're looking at potential issues with shoulder impingements and all kinds of things once you start adding load to all that. It also naturally points the chest towards the ground. One of the best cues for a squat is to keep the chest up high, right? So as you come out of the hole in a squat, a lot of good squat coaches will get the chest high and puff the chest up as you shoot out of the hole. And if you're rounded forward, the chest is gonna be pushing downward. You're more likely to fall forward. You're more likely to have the bar travel over the knees, which will put stress on the knees, stress on the low back. So right away, the first thing that I'm addressing is that forward head and those forward shoulders by- Pull everything back. Right. Yeah, so one of my favorite exercise is called the prone cobra. You can find this on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. That's a great exercise for bringing the shoulder blades back. Now, if you wanna follow along on the podcast literally, you can lay on your stomach on the floor, put your arms at your sides, twist your hands out. Okay, so you're rotating your hands out so that your thumbs start pointing up towards the ceiling and then stick your chest up, lift your chest up off the floor and try and pinch your shoulder blades back while also bringing them down and hold and squeeze that position. Now, an easier exercise for people that probably are more familiar with, just a good old fashioned row. You can do this with a band. You can do this with a dumbbell where you're pinching the shoulder blades back and down as you squeeze the back as the row to strengthen those mid-back muscles and pull the shoulders back. Now, I wanna make a point when you're doing exercises that are corrective exercises, lighten the load, slow down the tempo and put the emphasis on the opposite, the antagonist thing that's happening. So in other words, if forward shoulders is the issue, when I do that seated row or I do that prone cobra that Sal's talking about, I am going to exaggerate the squeeze and the flexing of the back, right? Because that's the opposite muscles that I'm trying to develop to work on the forward shoulder. So if I do a seated row, I'm gonna go really light, that I can control it, squeeze my shoulder blades and I might even hold that for three to five seconds to put emphasis on those muscles that I'm trying to engage. When it's corrective, I don't wanna load it so much that my form is going to break down. And a lot of people, oh, okay, I'm trying to work on my posture. They go, I could do heavier on the seated row. I can go heavier and go heavier. And also they're doing 150 pounds on a seated row just because they can, but they don't realize what they're doing is they're allowing their shoulders to roll forward, they're pulling all with their arms and just because they have the strength to do it, doesn't mean they're working on the corrective part of that exercise. Right, right. Now let's move down to the lower zone. This is not the lower body, it's kind of the middle of the body. In our assessment, we do a windmill as part of the assessment. It's also a phenomenal movement to work on mobility and strength in this area. And you can do a windmill, actually in fact, for correctional purposes, it's better to do it without any weight. And it's literally, you're standing with the wide stance, reaching down with one hand touching the floor and reaching up with the other one. So as you're bending over your twisting, again, you can find this on Mind Pump TV. But here's the key with it. You gotta maintain tension throughout your muscles. It's not just a stretch, it's not passive. I'm tight with everything. I'm doing everything with intention and trying to connect to that range of motion. That's what's gonna give you that mobility. And that detail is in that webinar that Justin did. So Justin takes them through this movement. So if you're, I mean, save you a lot of time in trying to find each one of these videos individually, that whole webinar, that whole assessment and all the zones that we're going through right now, Justin takes you through those. So follow that and pay attention when he takes you through all the exercises. Now, moving down further, 90-90 for the hips and the combat stretch for the ankles. Honestly, those literally those movements we just listed, either prone cobra or a row, your windmill, 90-90 combat stretch, that addresses probably 75 to 80% of the people listening to this podcast. If you just did those movements and worked on those movements, those will probably correct most of your issues as to why you can't squat fully. Now, a lot of people would ask like, what's the prescription or how much of this should I do? And the way we kind of wrote up this episode or what it looks like to reflect how we would take a client through the first 30 days is I wanna make sure that they are practicing these moves that we're talking about a minimum of three days a week. So two, three days a week, they are dedicated to doing all these exercises that address all these common areas that break down. And that's the main focus with body weight squats. That's it. We're not loading anything, we're not getting on any machines. All we are literally doing is we are having them perform the squat, which is their body weight, putting the work in with all this mobility, going back after they do all those mobility overs and squatting again and paying attention to the improvement of their range of motion and control just with their body weight. Yeah, now speaking of body weight squats, which is this is where you should start. You should start by practicing while you're doing those mobility movements. Practice body weight squats. If you need to put your arms out in front of you for balance initially, that's not a problem. But here's what you wanna do. Go slow and controlled, okay? Slow, tension and controlled. Go down as low as you comfortably can. Pause there for a second. Don't go any lower than you comfortably can. Then come all the way up and continue to challenge that. And you wanna emulate having load on your back. So like that being said, I wanna be able to brace properly through this whole time. So I wanna be able to provide that internal tension to make sure that my spine and everything is supported and straight as I'm going through this range of motion because that's gonna be crucial once we start kind of progressing and going forward. Right, so two to three days a week of this, you're probably looking at about 20 to 30 minutes of the mobility exercises and a good another 20 to 30 minutes of just practicing body weight squats with tension. That's what you're looking at probably in the first 30 days. And I wanna add to that, right? So that's kind of like the prescription that I'd want my client doing at the bare minimum, right? At least we're gonna, but that doesn't mean that, here's the individual variants where you will need to make this decision for yourself. Here's all the common areas that we broke down. Here's all these common mobility drills that we tell you that you should work on. Everybody, different ones are gonna make a bigger difference for each person, okay? For example, like of all those areas, I had to work on all those myself, but the biggest game changer for me was my ankles. That was the biggest limiting factor of all the things that I had to do. My ankle, because I'm a real tall guy, long limbs, that was the biggest limiter in me being able to get into a deep squat. So you have to kind of be aware of as you're going through these, wow, every time I do that 90, 90, my hips just feel really good. My low back feels good. I feel deeper in the squat, or oh man, every time I do those, you know, shoulder or windmill exercises, I just feel like I can keep good form. So pay attention to the ones that give you the most bang for your buck, and then don't be afraid to practice those throughout the week. You're watching TV with your kids and you're just sitting there on the floor. Get down and do the 99, do the combat stretch. Or if you're in the kitchen and you're waiting for dinner to be made or you're microwaving something, get in there and do two or three windmills. Try and practice these movements frequently throughout the day. You can't do too much of it when we're working on mobility. Right, so okay, so that's the first 30 days. Now you're moving into the second 30 days. So you've done 30 days of mobility, body weight squats, slow control. You've probably already noticed that your range of motion has gotten better and you've probably noticed that you feel way more stable and stronger with a body weight squat. The next phase now is to focus on unilateral strength, okay? So now we're gonna add a little load, but we're not gonna squat with load yet. Instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna do things like lunges, back step lunges, Bulgarian split stance, squats, step ups. There's another bit of- Single leg toe touch. Single leg toe touches. Exercises that either have you in a split stance to where one leg is in front, one leg is in the back, or you're on just one leg. And now it's safe to add load to these exercises. It's safe to add dumbbells or add some weight, increase your strength. Now what this is gonna do is this is gonna help balance out your right to left. It's also gonna build some strength in your body and it's setting you up for the last phase which would be doing the actual barbell squats. Yeah, I would add one more thing to that and that's just farmer walks, just to reinforce proper upright posture as well and being able to stabilize with weight now that we're introducing weights at your sides. And you can also do that with just one weight at your side too to even challenge that left to right even further. And again, if someone's looking for prescription without being as accurate as we can to a general population, I would like to see a client doing still those three days of mobility where we're focused there. And now I'm just gonna add one day of like real strength training which it would be a good 30 minute to 50 minute routine of these exercises that we're talking about right now. And I'm not going heavy, heavy. I am loading though. So I might put a barbell in their back. I might have them hold dumbbells. I might do hold a trap bar for farmer carries like Justin's talking about but this is gonna be our first like real strength training. The first bit was more mobility focused and control and tension isometric type stuff. Now we're moving into the second 30 days. Now I wanna build a little bit of strength and I wanna do it all unilateral training so it's a lot safer and we're working on control. One of the things most people notice right here is almost all of us will have some sort of a discrepancy. So I like to tell my clients to start with the weaker side always and then mirror that on the other side. So Sal brought up like Bulgarian squats or split stance squats. You may find out when you do those lunges or squats that your right leg is so much stronger than the left leg. So start with the weak leg first and however many reps that is, five to 12 is probably where I'd recommend you to be at in those 30 days. And while you're doing that whatever weight you choose make sure you mirror that on the strong side even if you can technically do more. And I also wanna emphasize a multi-planar, a multi-directional type unilateral training and what that means is just basically I'm also going side to side and considering those different planes of motion because you wanna familiarize your joints to being in different positions and how to use strength to get you out of those positions before we go into the bilateral type movements which we're building ourselves up to. Right, another good exercise is unilateral. A lot of people don't realize is you could do hip thrust with one leg. I love hip thrusts, one-legged hip thrusts for people who have trouble activating the hips. By the way, if this is you when you squat, if when you squat you find that your body wants to bend way forward, try doing front step lunges. That'll help work on your ankle mobility. If you find that you don't feel your hips or glutes activate very well when you try to squat then try doing back step lunges that tends to work the glutes and the hips a little bit. But as you're getting stronger here with the unilateral stuff, this is setting you up for the last phase, the last 30 days, which is when we're actually gonna start doing some barbell squats. We're actually gonna start loading. So this phase and this phase, you're still doing everything you did the first 30 days. You're still doing all the stuff you added the second 30 days. Now you can start to squat. I don't think it's a good idea to squat heavy just yet. All you're gonna do is squat light but start challenging your range of motion. Start playing with the depth of the squat. Start playing with pausing your squat. This is a technique I absolutely loved doing with clients and even with myself where instead of, you know, let's say they started squatting and now we've got the range of motion that we want. We've got some of the mobility we want and we're squatting with just the bar and the client, you know, does 10 reps and they're like, wow, I think I can add weight now. I'll say not yet. Here's what we're gonna do. I want you to go to the bottom. Let's pause at the bottom for four seconds and keep tension and keep your body tight. Don't sit at the bottom. Brother, stop at the bottom and support yourself. Pause for about four or five seconds and then come right back up. Just to help reinforce what usually is the weakest part in somebody's squat, which is at the very bottom. That tends to be where people either hurt themselves or lose stability at the very bottom. So I like to have people pause there to get started. And it's especially important to go slow to be able to recognize where these deviations occur where this loss of bracing occurs. So, which is something that I've noticed too with clients where they get a little bit closer, where they're unfamiliar and their body just naturally wants to arch the back and lose support with their core. So that's something I like to address that with something I call the dumpy squat where we push a stick up into the cage. And it just helps to reinforce the fact that you have to, as I'm pushing up, I'm going down but I'm really, what I'm doing is creating that natural bracing mechanism to stay tight. And now back to what the prescription for this looks like for this person, right? So now we're in the final 90 days of this. You should be doing at least two to three days focused on mobility, one day focus on unilateral type movements. And now one day of the week, you're focused on bilateral. So both feet on the ground, regular squatting. And if you're a trainer and you're listening to this this is such a great kind of plan to follow for most of your clients. And you can easily sprinkle in some isolation exercises to appease the arms and shoulders and these other movements that people are going to want to address. But building the program around this, I wish I did more of this in my earlier career. This is what I started to do later on because I realized how beneficial the squat was to the point Sal made at the beginning of this podcast that doesn't matter if their goal was strength, if it was fat loss, if it was mobility, if it was longevity, getting them to squat and squat with good form had so much carryover into all those pursuits that I should have been programming most of my programs like this where it's like, okay, number one focus is to get this person to be able to squat and move properly. All the other bullshit will sprinkle in. Buy-and-try day, calf day, all these little things that are like such small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. I'll sprinkle those into their routine or add them into these unilateral and bilateral training days just so we kind of touch all the other muscles. But I really wanna put all my energy into can I get this person to move and squat better? And if I can and I do focus on that, I know that they will get more benefit from that than any other way of training. I can't stress this enough. Go to mapsprimewebinar.com and watch and follow along with the assessment. It's gonna make such a huge difference. For you specifically, it's individualized because what you're gonna do is you're gonna follow the test that Justin takes Doug through. And as he teaches you, you'll be able to see for yourself what areas you need to focus on. It makes a tremendous, tremendous difference. And then the second thing you should do, we mentioned a bunch of movements and exercises. We mentioned, of course, lunges and step ups and dumpy squats and prone cobras and rows. Our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV has them all. These should be linked with this podcast as well. So you should have everything you need, not just with the information on this podcast, but with all the free links that we're gonna provide to you to be able to get your squat to look tremendously better from where you're at now to 90 days from now. And a lot of you listening right now who are healthy, otherwise no pain, and maybe you're already kind of working out, you should be able to do full controlled good squats at the end of 90 days if you just follow the protocol that we outlined in today's podcast. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video and audio. So if you wanna see our faces, come check us out on YouTube Mind Pump podcast. You can also find all of us on Instagram including Doug, the producer. You can find Doug at Mind Pump Doug, Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Salon, Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Dude, worked out this morning. So you guys know I'm on, it's time now, right? You guys know that, right? Well, it's time. It's time to get hardcore again. Oh yeah, good luck with that, considering you're gonna be another. I was gonna say, you got a real brief window, bro. That's good to say, I remember that. I was like hardcore for leading into it. I was even rocking and rolling.