 The king of all exercise the barbell squat it is true this is the king it's phenomenal for developing the lower body but a lot of people also see upper body gains from getting better at the squat so today's episode is all about the barbell squat this is the masterclass you can't come out make that statement argument that the deadlift was the point is a masterclass I lean more towards this is the king personally do you really yeah oh well I do mainly because of our trainer well or one exercise you're better yeah maybe it's a favoritism thing I really enjoy the squat personally but yeah it's just in terms of being able to address the entire kinetic chain and strengthen the entire body I there's like really no question the squats right there yeah I mean king or not yes it's either fundamental yeah it's that that it's up there it's so it's so beneficial in in the sense of when you look at the time spent squatting and the value and the results that you get from the squat there's really very few exercises that we can even put in the same conversation okay getting better and stronger at barbell squatting you can take five other exercises and combine them and you might not even get close so it's just it's just exceptional and anybody who's ever done barbell squats for a long period of time and really perfected them and worked on them will tell you it's it's definitely one of the best exercises from a muscle building perspective athletic performance there's got great general carryover now I know that there's a lot of functional you know arguments that come out and once you get better at a sport or should I say as you start to get more specialized and become more of an expert of a sport then the training needs to become more specialized but when it comes to general carryover barbell squats are up there you get stronger barbell squat you'll see lots of carryover into other physical pursuits and then from a fat loss perspective because such a large you know muscle mass or so much your muscle mass is affected when we talk about the metabolism boosting effects of building muscle and then you know what that does for fat loss like you know the squat is incredible like if we're trying to get lean barbell squats or got to be up there because of the amount of muscle that they build it would be really cool to see a physique that is uh someone who only squats like three to five times a week that's all they do that's a nothing with squatting and to see what kind of physique would be built from just that it'd be probably I bet you it would be more surprising than you would think as far as like how aesthetic and how good they would they could look just from that because of how much of the entire body is activated from now in work we're assuming it's like perfect form four inch of motion they're incorporating explosive with slow tempo with polite if you like that's all they did was just master the squat all of its variations nothing but that I bet I bet you could you would build a pretty good looking physique now of course you would need more nap for balance and all that sure but I think the point that you're making is uh so much is activated I mean it's okay obviously a barbell squat is widely known as a lower body exercise and that's I mean that's somewhat true right a lot of the the muscle building effects and the strength building effects are to the lower body from the hips down but you also have a lot of core activation low back stability you need to have a strong stable low back up upper back you need to have a good stable thoracic spine shoulders shoulders mobility rotation and really like it puts a lot of pressure on the upper back which you know you don't really consider that yeah just to hold the bar in place and just really intention there so it's just exceptional for that you know it's funny there's an old saying this is an old bodybuilding saying and when I first read this as a kid I thought that's really weird but then I experienced it myself and it said uh if you want to add a half a half an inch to your arms add 50 pounds to your squat or something along those lines right I remember reading similar stuff that said like you want to increase your bench press by 30 or 50 pounds increase your squat yeah it's really strange right and it's like okay how's that how's that make sense that translate it just affects the entire body um and and I think part of it has to do with the fact that you're you're there are some limiters in the body in the sense that it will only allow you to get as strong as it thinks you can handle safely and you'll only build as much muscle as your body believes is safe from a balanced perspective so what does this mean in practice if I don't build my legs very well my upper body's only going to get so big and we see this with studies you're very interesting studies well they'll take and they'll put a leg in a cast and immobilize it and then they'll train the other leg and yes the leg that gets trained builds a lot of muscle but the leg that's immobilized actually loses less muscle than had they not trained the other leg to begin with so there's like this interesting kind of balancing carryover effect and barbell squats are like one or two in terms of like this systemic kind of muscle building signal most of it of course localized to the main muscles of the lower body but there is this interesting systemic effect that happens from this is why we can really narrow it down to kind of like those two main lifts either between the deadlift camp or the squat camp because of how you can load such a substantial amount of weight for both of those exercises and then that how much force you have to generate be able to you know sustain and protect the spine but also to be able to generate enough force to then move all of that weight up and down it's going to affect like all the muscles that are lighting up to to produce and create a stable environment for that it'd be interesting to know how much of that is attributed to just the overall load volume that you're training with because you can train at such a high load with those two movements and how much of that is attributed to like what it does for the cns i just i feel like i don't think you can separate them i think they're all so close to connected you know the load with the cns it's the second heaviest exercise you'll probably be able to do some people could squat more than the deadlift but usually that's the other way around so it's one of the heaviest weights you'll ever lift it's crushing forces on you yeah yeah is a squat and it not only loads the lower body but it loads the spine and the upper body as well thus strengthening all of those things thus making the entire body strong and then we talk about the core your if you're holding you know you get strong at the squat your core has to be able to support that and stabilize it has to be able to stabilize your spine so your core gets really strong and stable at the very least in the squatting position but definitely lots of carry or everywhere so that means your obliques or your abs your transverse abdominis the whole lumbel pelvic hip area i mean all those muscles that keep everything from falling apart they have to be able to support you during an exercise is to be extremely heavy so you're you get a strong core even from doing you know i think i think that was one of the main contributors to eliminating my low back pain from squatting aside from it opening my hips up and the work i had to do on my mobility work on my hips but also just the the slow progression of of load on the squat getting stronger and stronger strengthening my core and that being being supportive for the low back i actually think that that has a lot to do with why that went away once i started to squat and squat heavier and heavier all sudden i didn't have this low back pain which is so ironic because the what you would hear from even from doctors is you know people get low back issues oh don't squat stay away from squatting and so a lot of people i think connect squatting as this oh dangerous thing or if you have back issues that you should stay away from it and ironically i had back issues part of the reasons why i made the excuse of why i didn't like to squat was oh my back doesn't feel good doesn't feel right and it was all it really was was i needed to work on squatting properly opening my hips up so i could get a full range of motion get a stronger core and then all of a sudden that all came together for me you know yeah it's interesting to me that that's always like their go-to you're gonna eliminate a fundamental movement instead of just introducing it in a progressive way of progressively overloading yourself so you just get a little bit stronger a little bit stronger more capable adding more low to where to the point where it becomes you become way more resilient towards any of these other type of stresses that you're gonna face that would hurt your lower back you know from being weak and not supported yeah it's interesting you mentioned it's a fundamental movement it is now there's other movements that are considered fundamental at walking running throwing twisting squatting is a a fundamental human movement meaning you don't want to you don't want to lose the ability to squat now you can see this often in third world countries people rest in a squat position they literally sit in a squatted position and before the invention of chairs this is probably how we relaxed but we didn't just sit in it we also had to have enough mobility and strength to jump up out of a squat if something happened or if we needed to do something or if we were gathering we're down in this kind of squat position people like my low back hurts when I bend over doing stuff that's probably not how we did lots of things on the ground and again we know this through modern hunter-gatherers so it is a a fundamental human movement and you want to keep those around because your body was designed or evolved to be able to maintain or have those kind of movements and when you lose them you actually lose other types of functions that's why it's so damn important today's program giveaway maps aesthetic here's how you can win leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications if you win we'll let you know in the comment section we're also running a sale right now on maps anabolic advanced it's half off if you're interested click on the link at the top of the description below all right here comes a show now there are different types of squats with the barbell on the back the two main variations are the low bar and high bar squat that just that basically is talking about where the bar is placed on the back now olympic lifters tend to like to do the high bar squat and power lifters tend to like to do the low bar squat each of them a little bit different both are great really really doesn't make a big difference for the average person which one you pick i will say that the high bar probably will definitely requires more mobility yeah more skill and more mobility than the low bar especially in the ankles but other than that i don't think it's a big difference i think i think there is a body type that each of them are are better for you right for example if you have somebody who has if you know you have a very long torso a low bar squat team seems to be more advantageous or easier for you to master because of how long your torso is and so putting the bar lower so that when you hinge over it's still center center of just tall people in general right tall people in general but even more so with a long torso right or you know it's that that is going to be more advantage and if you have a shorter torso i think it's easier for you to do a high bar so that being said i think there's tremendous value in working towards the ability to both i had to start being a tall person long torso i had to start with more of a low bar squat to start with and over time working on my ankle mobility my hip mobility getting a greater range of motion being able to sit upright uh i then could get to a high bar but i couldn't do a high bar right out the gates i didn't have i didn't i didn't have the skill set or the mobility and so it was easier for me to start with a low bar one thing to touch on too before we continue um are the pads that people put on the bar when they do a squat and i understand why they have them placing the bar on your back if you've never done it before you don't know the right position it can hurt it's like uncomfortable yeah it's like it's on your back or it's on your spine on your neck that hurts first off if you place the bar properly um it doesn't hurt at all you could support a tremendous amount of weight i mean you know people will squat five six hundred pounds uh with the bar just plainly on the back and there's no issues whatsoever so it's not you're just not placing it right also when you put a pad on the bar you do raise the center of gravity so you've made your squat a higher bar squat than normal so a high bar becomes a very high bar squat a lower squat low bar squat becomes a high bar squat because of the circumference of the pad that changes your biomechanics it changes your movement it actually also potentially moves the bar away from your body requiring you to hold it more with your hands even though your hands are on the bar on a barbell squat the hands aren't really holding the bar in fact really really good squatters and they there's videos of this they'll take their hands down and the bar will rest on their back without them supporting their hands or a lot of them you know you'll see with like their fingers yeah they're just their fingers barely even like a Ben Pollock have we ever watched him get in and he wraps in and then like his like fingertips are the only thing that's holding yeah 600 pounds on his yeah and i'm saying that because you know i don't want people think they have to hold it with their hands behind their back uh because that's not a great position to be in as far as the injury is concerned i wanted to touch on that uh all complex movements have a high risk of injury if you can't do them so if you do that if you do a squat improperly or use a weight that's not appropriate or you lack the prerequisite stability or strength um then the risk of injuries pretty high and that's just because it's a complex movement so and by the way all exercises are are dangerous when you don't have the prerequisites to be able to perform them barbell squats just just are more complex require a little bit more stability and mobility than other the most other not all exercise but most other exercises it's like anything else in life the higher the risk the higher reward and so it takes a little more education it takes a little more practice you know to get good at it but the beauty of that is you get way more reward for doing that just like investing or anything else it's like you can be really really conservative with your exercise choice and do things that don't give you a major return but then don't expect this amazing physique or amazing results to happen overnight because you're doing movements that are very low risk and don't give you a lot of return yeah but not to mention this though which which makes it different from investments which is the when you do it right it's perfectly safe there is no danger to doing a any exercise that you could perform with the right strength for the weight that you're using mobility and stability it's perfectly safe I don't care what exercise it is that includes barbell squats so if you get hurt doing an exercise it's not the exercise that hurt you it was your inability to do the exercise appropriately and that again that could be your stability mobility or just used an inappropriate weight or whatever so it's not the exercise that hurt you it's you that hurt you so think of it that way so what are the requirements when you do barbell squat or to be able to do a good barbell squat you have to have for sure good hip and ankle and thoracic mobility and stability but definitely hip and especially ankle a lot of people don't know this but ankle mobility issues probably cause more bad squats than almost anything else and that's because when you squat down your ankles have to bend quite a bit to allow your knees to move forward and if you don't have the good stability and mobility in them then what ends up happening is your feet will try to twist and turn out as you go down or your heels will lift or your knees will start to move in funny directions and now you're you're turning a safe exercise into something very simple way to test this to know if this is what your limiting factor is if you go if I take somebody and I just do this my family all the time and like get them to go as low as you can squat down as low as you can and hold it and if you go as low as you can and you hold it and it's uncomfortable legs are burning like crazy shins are like you can't hold that position comfortably it's your ankles that aren't allowing you to get down there if you take yourself and you put yourself on a slant right or elevate the hills and then you could sit all the way down comfortably you know it's your ankles you know it's your ankles and most of the time it is the ankles now a lot of times if you have somebody who has poor ankle mobility yet they've continued to squat really really heavy then it sometimes limits it becomes the hips also in addition to that but more often than not I've been able to get somebody into a really deep good squat simply by just addressing their ankle by the way what contributes to ankle mobility issues is also a foot that is weak and unstable so you might be thinking what the heck is that going on here what do you mean a foot well if you looked at an anatomy picture of the bottom of a foot it's covered in muscle and those muscles have to be stable and strong to support you when you're doing anything with your lower body and that includes yeah and that includes a squat so if the foot is weak and you squat the foot will flatten or your ankle starts to pronate and then you'll start to see ankle mobility issues as well so this also includes the foot then the hip right what about the hip the hip has to be strong and stable enough to keep your knees from getting lots of problems because the hip is such a versatile joint that if it's not able to keep you in a strong position and your knees have to prevent things from twisting well now yeah now you've got yourself you need those knees to to be in a secure position and not wavering inward or outward have an internal external rotational problems where I can't keep my knees tracked in in place to where the that stress inevitably is going to end up where those weak points are so if my weak points are bringing me in you know that's that force is all going to go right to that point of of weakness versus it traveling then then through into the ground and out the other thing too is hip mobility issues often look like back pain especially at the si area the sacroiliac joint so if you if you get low back pain that's kind of like to the right or to the left so like you're like oh my low back hurts and you're like well it's kind of on the side of my low back or on either end that can be this si joint and oftentimes that's because you don't have good hip mobility and good hip strength so you try to squat and the hips aren't able to support what you're doing and that joint gets a little overstressed and it feels like low back pain anytime that we have chronic pain anywhere it's weakness somewhere else being expressed there right so that's that when you have an issue and you're like oh my my knees hurt oh my back hurts oh my shoulder hurt oh you have these areas that bother you it's because you have weakness or dysfunction somewhere around there that needs to be addressed you address the weakness the instability near there and then you find that the pain goes away almost always and that's worth and that's going back to my low back pain I had weak hips I just had weak and stable hips that I hadn't been trained in focusing on I wasn't doing deep squatting I wasn't doing a lot of lateral movement lost all that stuff started to focus focus on that and the pain completely went away because now I had strong stable hips yeah you also want a really stable and strong core now what's the core those are all the muscles that surround the spine the lower back but also the muscles that contribute to the stability of the spine believe it or not the lats actually also contribute and there's hip flexor muscles that contribute to a stable core so it's not just the abs and not just the obliques right there's lots of muscles that surround the spine and then ones that contribute from the bottom and from the top that stabilize it you want all those muscles to work together to provide good stability why do I say work together because there is an appropriate strength ratio or should I say relationship between these muscles and if one muscle let's say is stronger than it should be in that relationship now you have an increased risk of injury so it's similar to like people will get like hamstring pulls because they don't have the right quad to hamstring strength ratio when like you see this with sprinters this can happen with the core as well so what does that mean that means you don't just want to have a stable core because your erector spinae muscles are stable or just because your abs are strong or just because your obliques are strong but you might want to also have or you should also have strong transverse abdominis is the muscles that surround the spine that you draw in on you want to have strong ql muscles these are the muscles on the side of the spine that stabilize you laterally you want to have good hip flexor strength and stability you want to have lats that aren't too tight but also stable because that also stables uh stabilizes the core and uh basically you want to have a good well functioning stable core to be able to perform squats or at the very least use a weight that's appropriate for your core so you don't you want everything packed and tight and supportive and and you know addressing the uh thoracic mobility as well like and I've seen this with my own clients where you if you have these desk jobs and all these jobs we have these protracting shoulders and I'm starting to that's now affecting the way that my posture is going into the squat and I have rounding in the back and uh you know that that's sort of um unfavorable postural position will create stress points where you know that load is gonna it's gonna drive right into those those weak points yep 100 um some of the best priming slash warm-up movements you could do now priming is very individual but the ones we're about to go over probably apply to most people that will help them accomplish better squats now I do want to also add this when you become a master of barbell squatting which takes a long time then you probably are not going to need to prime nearly as much then you can literally prime by doing the squat itself as a warm-up because you're so connected to the movement you know what muscles to activate you know what good position feels like then warming up with the squat is not a problem why am I addressing this there's a lot of strength athletes that say that priming is stupid and worthless well maybe for them because when they get into squat they know how to activate what they need to but when I would train clients like whenever you're teaching any complex skill I'd have to break it down into pieces I couldn't say let's practice a light squat stabilize your hips focus on ankle mobility brace your core I do 15 different things at one time you can't cue a client who's just learning how to exercise first time to retract your shoulders open your hips you know like it's literally like tuning uh let's say your violin versus the whole orchestra you know it's like you know let's start with the violin you have to break it down into pieces and this is true for most people not just beginners I mean how long would it take you to become a master of squatting I mean I guess if you really focus on it could take a couple years for most people it's even longer than that I'm talking about like really dedicated people who are exercising I think you could because I don't consider myself a master squatter and I don't have to prime like I used to I think what it really requires is putting the work the mobility priming work and diligently long enough to be really connected to your weak areas and you know that and once you've established that then you can kind of get in that position and know that for example when when I'm squatting I know that I need I need that ankle mobility I need my knees to be able to drive over my toes I know I need to keep my knees from collapsing in and forcing my hips out I know I had to sit up tall with my chest now I have priming movements that I do to train all that to activate it to walk and I did that consistently for a year and a half two years now I can get into that position right I know what it feel I know that with the band pull apart feel like to get my chest up or the zone one feels like I know what the combat stretch feels like to drive my knees over I know what opening my hips feels like up in the 90 90 okay now I have trained that so you know consistently that when I get in the squat I can feel all that stuff I would say this though because I don't I also don't consider myself a master of the squat it's a harder exercise for me but if you were to ask me if I were to do a max or if I were to ask you to do a max you probably would do priming well well yeah I mean as a squat master would just warm up sure I mean but I mean that's that that analogy in my opinion is talking to somebody who is a great baseball player and you're going to go do a home run derby and saying like could you go hit the ball and be fine or do you want to win this derby it's like well I want to win this derby so I'm going to do all my I'm going to do all my rituals and priming and set me up to hit it out the well there's more value to priming than just just priming too that's also another thing you're pointing to but I'm saying this because priming is not dumb warm-ups that are proper are valuable to 95% of the people watching right now so the following movements are probably the most value for most people when it comes to squatting and the first one is 90 90 90 90 rep it's a it's a you're in a seated position on the floor one leg is in front of you bent and 90 degrees and the other one is behind you bent and 90 degrees and so what you're doing is you're working on internal and external rotation rotation of the hips and then when you switch your legs now you're working on internal external rotation rotation excuse me of the hips on the opposite side now when you're in that position you don't just sit there because that's just a stretch we're not just trying to stretch we're trying to activate so what you do in that position then is you focus on staying tense maintain your posture without having to hold yourself up or down and then if you can lift the knee off lift a foot off the floor all while staying in that position and then switching legs and what this is doing is it's getting you connected to those muscles that stabilize internal and external rotation right the next one would be the combat stretch I think this is the most valuable priming movement for most people and this is because it directly affects what we just brought up earlier about it like the majority of people the ankle is limiting totally in fact I had so one of our editors Dylan I think it was Dylan was squatting no it was Alex he was squatting and I watched him squat and I could see that he needed some ankle mobility so I had him do combat stretch and he never done it properly so we got on the floor the way it looks is you're on the floor you're kneeling and you bring your knee forward without letting your heel come off the floor so you're kind of sitting in this like in a combat position so imagine someone kneeling on the floor with like a rifle you bring the knee forward don't let the heel come off the floor until your ankle no longer allows you to move forward anymore and you'll feel a stretch in the back like where your calf or your soleus is now when you get there you don't just hold it you try now to pull your toes up off the floor like you're trying to get yourself to move more in that position and then you try to push into the floor without without moving and you alternate and what you're trying to do is activate all the muscles in that new range of motion so that you have the stability and posterior and posterior yeah and I did this with both it's funny I did it with Alex for approximately 60 seconds he went back to squat he's like holy cow this is like so different I mean that's the that's the thing about this that I think is so fascinating is if you actually apply this like you can you can feel and see a difference I mean I told you guys I used to love to teach this class it's the same class that is available for people to watch on the PrimeProWebinar.com that we offered and I would make my clients cold right they just came in I had a lunch advanced age people that I was doing these classes with and I I would have them all squat 10 reps body weight just 10 weight body weight squats and so they could feel and then I would take them through the whole class and then we would end the class with the 10 squats and you always like oh my god you know like they would say it they would feel it they could feel a difference on just by priming all those all those different priming movements and then going back and doing that like it will improve the squat like instantly by the way you can watch we have a video that teaches you some of these movements I think it's PrimeProWebinar.com and it's totally free and Adam actually takes you through some of these things another priming movement which is good for the upper back the thoracic is just a band row you could do a cable as well and this is just to get the shoulders back and down get that nice strong tight position for placing the bar and you'd be surprised how many people have challenges with just getting their shoulders arms and back in that position another one would be the wall test that we have in maps yeah the zone to me the zone one is the best for the I give you don't have that so the band row is the easiest thing to find for somebody who's listening it doesn't have our our prime program or I've seen the zone one test but I mean the zone test literally looks everything I mean it looks like what you're about to do even better yeah because I mean if you get your average person against the wall and you're you tell them now to be in that position and try and like press their arms back they're probably going to get about this far they're not going to get close so let's think about that in turn you're not even getting to the point where you can get the bar on your back yeah you have to lean forward protrude your neck out and so you're going to be in bad postural position so that's going to prime you to be able to be in that good upright we also coach you to activate your core and press your back flat yeah which is so valuable to getting ready for a squat also so you're activated you're teaching a client to not only get in that retracted position then to also brace with your core and so and then you have a wall for feedback I think it's the ultimate like get ready for a squat prime in my opinion the band row it would be my default if you didn't know what a zone one was and you're listening for the first time but if you don't know I mean that's like to me that is like such a good prime movement to set somebody up with before they go into a squat all right so let's talk about the workout now when you're doing barbell squats you should be in a squat rack okay so there are variations of squats where you take a barbell off the floor put on your back we're not talking about those yet those are totally different we're talking about traditional barbell squat where you unrack a bar from a squat rack now sometimes people ask where do you place the bar like where should it be on the rack it should be high enough to where you could get underneath it but low enough to where when you stand straight up it's off the hooks well you don't want to do and I've seen people do this before is they set the bar so high yeah that they have to get up on their toes to take it off the racks that is not smart that's easy and I've seen people try to rack away after a hard set miss one of them and that's not that's where it becomes a really big problem so you want to get you want to have to get under the bar so your knees are a little bent stand up with it now it's off the hooks now what you do is you take a couple steps back get into your perfect squat position make sure your feet are grounded you're in a good position you're looking straight ahead you're braced and tight and then you begin your squat do not start the squat haphazardly so glad you went this direction because I didn't even think about this until we started talking about probably one of the most common mistakes I see people do is they don't put the bar at the right level and then when they go to re-rack what's a common mistake yeah they look to the left and they look to the right and then the one one side hits the other side and so and what I cue is like if I set you up right where you have to bend the knee a little bit you know so bend the knee by three or four inches to get under the bar and then stand up if I did that right the bar should still be within that pin range you know I'm saying how you have the different levels of pins above the hook basically so that when it comes time to re-rack when the set is over this is the part that everybody messes up is you don't even look at the sides you walk into it you hit the front push and slide down and then slide down that's it I mean that that you should not you I'm so glad you said that you should not rack one side of the bar and then the other you are twisting with weight that you probably shouldn't that's where a lot of people get hurt or mess or drop like I see that all the time like you literally should be able to look straightforward slamming into the thing and then let it slide down let it slide down all right so since we're here like what do you do if if you can't finish a rep with the squat and we're we'll get to the warm up and stuff but I do want to address this you should you should have safeties this is ideal it's ideal to be in a squat rack that allows you to put safeties to where when you're at the bottom of the squat uh-oh if I can't come up I could just sit down come down and then and I only come down another inch or two right and I'm on the safeties that's ideal okay second far less ideal is there are no safeties meaning if I go down I can't come up uh-oh would I do now you throw it back yeah do not fold forward no the people will try to fold don't do that you literally throw the weight back off your back let it hit the ground and if you have a spotter they need to know you're going to do that because a proper spot with a squat is not on the bar it's around the chest but only spot someone if they say help if they don't say help and they're like I'm gonna dump it move back so the guy could throw it don't feel like you have to save it or anything or save anybody from loud noise or I feel like there's somewhat of a reserve in terms of like uh trying to to still be able to be quiet or be quiet or move it somewhere just literally launch it back behind you in in step four I'm so not a fan of a spotter for a squat yeah me I believe you should you're better dumping it you I believe you should either one have safeties and then let it come down with safeties or two learn how to bail correctly yourself there's nothing and I do it all and you know what it's good practice to do that you should practice with so I love that I mean you guys have probably seen me out here many times missus and bail all by and I don't call I could easily call one of these guys who I know could properly squat me I don't care I don't need to and I in the way I'll do it is when I come out if I don't feel like I'm even getting out of the hole I'll just just get rid of it it's not worth me trying to grind it out just to say I did it just like I'm gonna go down if I can't I can come up controlled and I feel myself stuck I'm bailing I'm not a power lifter and I go into some meat don't matter that day if I don't get that weighed up now that being said if I owned a gym right now I would not allow anybody to barbell squat without safeties that's I think it's that big of a deal for the average person advanced lifters who know to dump away Olympic lifters are great at it they don't even use safeties they just come off you know whatever yeah but everybody gets just go into squat rack with safeties nowadays I think every gym has them when I was younger it was actually really hard to find a power cage we stopped the barbell squat out of most gym time but now every gym has them so use use them okay so when you get started you want to do some of the priming movements that we talked about that should take you about five to ten minutes and then slowly work up to a your your working weight so what does that mean that means you start with the bar then you add a little bit of weight then you add a little more weight and give yourself as many of those sets as you need until you feel like good and loose and tight at the same time and strong enough to do your work set you should probably avoid lifting the failure with barbell squats I think you should avoid lifting to failure with most exercises most of the time barbell squats unless you really know how to dump away and you've got good safeties going to failure on a barbell squat is it's one of the scariest exercises to go failure that's a bench press is probably more scary because you can't dump the weight you kind of drop it on yourself but a barbell squat I mean I don't think it's a good idea to train to that point because form goes out the window people are afraid to dump the weight they end up twisting and listen we're already getting so much reward for squatting we don't need to squeeze out another you know because obviously there's benefits to taking the body to failure right there's point of resources support that there is some value to occasionally doing that but the risk versus reward to this person right if I've got somebody who I've already convinced that squatting is good for them and it's going to be of such value I don't need to push to that I don't need to increase the risk by going hey let's go max out too and see see we can squeeze out a little bit more out of this it's just like at that point I'm already getting so much value from getting you to learn how to squat and get better and slowly increase your your weight on the bar over time that there's not a lot of value in this person doing single or doubles out the gates I mean that's not something you mess with until way later yeah now something to keep in mind with the bar this is important for most exercise but really important for barbell squats I like slow negatives I really like a slow negative rep with the barbell squat because it allows you to stay in good technique in good form and then here's the other side of it a lot of people don't realize this but when you change directions with a rep you the weight momentarily becomes heavier because of momentum okay so if you lower a 50 pound dumbbell and you try and change directions at the moment of changing directions you're also fighting the momentum so it's no longer 50 pounds momentarily it's a lot heavier the faster you lower the weight the heavier the weight becomes momentarily barbell squats because the weight is so heavy it's one of the strongest exercise you do I do not think you should do anything fast with the barbell squat the only exception are elite or high level olympic lifters and they do something completely different so if you watch an olympic lifter they bounce at the bottom I'm gonna tell you guys right now the average person tries to bounce the bottom of squat you're gonna get a little shred you're 100% gonna get hurt yeah don't do that yeah I just think that this this rule applies to all exercise in my opinion I'm such a fan of slow I mean with many times on this show I've talked about walk around a gym show me somebody who's doing a four second negative you never see it that's what all the research is around when it's like the the best tempo rep range stuff for hypertrophy and building muscle right is that four second negative very few people do it anyway so you're better off going four or five six seconds on the way down than trying to speed it up with two seconds or less so totally how many days a week should you squat uh squats are interesting it's a complex hard works a lot of muscles movement yet people tend to respond really well with frequency with squats more so than like deadlifts uh squats people tend to handle a lot of frequent now you got to modify the intensity so you can't hammer yourself every workout but uh most people two to three days a week is a pretty damn good prescription for barbell squatting and they do better with three days a week than they would with one in my experience even if the volume was equated even if they were doing the same amount of sets so frequent barbell squatting seems to be pretty good well listen there's there was a viral sensation like I don't know how many years ago it was that was the squat every day thing that comes around every year right and so you could technically squat every day but what's important to note is that as the frequency increases with especially with a movement like that that's so taxing you have to modify intensity you cannot squat three four times a week and bring the same intensity to the lift every single day otherwise you're not going to allow your body to recover adapt grow and and get better backwards yeah you'll go about or you'll plateau really quick right so um two to three is for sure the sweet spot even at two or three it looks something like real heavy day you know a you know range of motion type of focused tempo type of day and then maybe like a light speed day or something in there right so you have you still and basically what we're doing by by doing that is we're modifying intensity right the intensity to do tempo squats with you know probably 50 of the weight on what you would consider a heavy day is really bringing down the intensity and and bringing down the recovery how much damage you're going to do totally all right so let's talk about some advanced techniques of variations one of my favorites is pausing the rep with the barbell squat i love and i love this with clients as well where we would squat down and i'd have them pause the rep where they tend to be most challenged now of course this requires me to lower the weight so if i train a client and i notice it's at the bottom which most people have the challenge at the bottom of the rep then i would go lighter and i'd have them come down and i'd say we're going to hold the weight at the bottom for five seconds and hold good technique and tension there and then come up this is a great technique for almost any exercise but the i love it most with barbell squats yeah because there is a little bit of that sort of recoil kind of elastic energy like help you get right when you get a little bit of momentum when you when you squat down and then you drive back up and you kind of are able to uh to use that when you take that away and you're sitting in it you have to really focus on being able to generate force uh without any of that added help and momentum back up and it's it's it helps a lot when that's the sticking point for most people you get down in that position that weight feels extra heavy yeah and along those lines the box squat is great box squat that's amazing that's where you sit down on a bench or a box stay tight with your body wait a couple seconds while you're sitting and then stand back up you eliminate the changing directions the the elastic energy that you that the muscles build up and in my experience box squats are a less risky version of squats for most people so i really enjoyed doing i use them differently though right so like i love your you know the pause squat um for modifying what i was talking about earlier with the intensity right so let's say let's say what would be considered a heavy day for squatting for me right now like 300 pounds right so a 300 pound squat is a is a heavy would be a heavy day for me if i were to go do pause squats i'm going to drop what we done like 135 like that like 135 with a good pause at the bottom for me is that's that's state tight oh yeah bro that's a that's a tough workout still yet i'm using 50 of the load i prefer that where box squats all have a tendency to want to load more because i can you know but if i were to do like let's say a heavy day on monday i would not go box squats on wednesday or friday because i could load the box i would use box squats in replace of what would normally be a heavy day so let's say the following week i'm like oh monday this is my heavy day oh you know what i haven't done in a while i haven't done box squats well let's load up and do box squats for my heavy loaded day i like the pause squats more where i'm trying to force myself to you know lower the weight because i you're adding frequency but going lower the intensity yes i agree with that that's good you also can use bands and chains bands or chains on a barbell squat and bands uh and chains are similar in the sense that they both add kind of progressive resistance so when you have chains hanging off the ends of the bar going straight down the top of the rep when i'm holding the weight straight up i'm holding almost all or all of the weight of the heavy chains but as i squat the links hit the ground and the weight becomes lighter now why is this awesome well because i tend to be weaker at the bottom than i am at the top so as i go lower and get weaker the weight gets lighter as i come up load yeah it gets heavier so i can actually load the bar heavier than i would traditionally because it's lighter when i need it to be and heavier when i need it to be bands very similar if i attach bands i get a similar effect that i would get with chains if you had to pick one or the other personally i like bands better but they're both a little different so i think you should try definitely try both yeah and i mean you that i've seen people do with bands too there's also a way to kind of uh attach them from the the top the top yeah so you can actually load a little bit more weight so this is again back to uh that elastic energy potential that you can kind of build with that recoil effect it just adds an added amount of elastic energy to help you lift you on the way back up well also so this is now this is the way i use these is like okay i mentioned earlier i'm not a fan of using a spotter ever but let's say there's a day where uh let's say right now like my my max i would probably not be able to even get a 400 pound squat right now so let's say a 400 400 pound squat i'd be really nervous to do that without let's say a squatter or thinking that i might have to bail here's a great time this is where i'm going to utilize band to get band assistant squats like okay i'm gonna put 400 pounds on it but i'm gonna wrap the bands on there to help me get out of the hole and i know that because i have that assistance the likelihood that i'm gonna have to bail or i'm not gonna be able to get it i'm gonna be able to get that rep out so when i want to push the weight i love utilizing what's interesting about bands in that sense is like whether they're attached to the bottom or the top you're still getting weight that's heavier at the top and weight that's lower at the bottom sometimes someone would say well what's the difference why do you put them on the bottom or the top why not just pick one or the other it feels different and i really don't know how to explain it other than that well you're getting assistant at the you're getting assistance on the bottom a bottom yeah but the my point is you're getting more assistance at the bottom less at the top so the weight's heaviest at the top no i know i know same thing with kind of but not really what you what i get what you're saying what you're trying to explain it there is a difference when i'm at the when i'm using bands that get that tighten the top when i'm at the very bottom the bands have or have no play whatsoever they're pulling the hardest yeah well no no i'm saying when they're when they're down sure when they're on the ground and i'm squatted all the way in the hole the bands are relaxed there's no there's no feel of the bands at all most they're irrelevant is at the top and then the most there's the opposite is the case in the other that's right and so the opposite is when they're coming from the top i'm all the way down the bottom you can feel the bands yeah they're being stretched and pulled but my point is the resistance is similar but you're right you're right that's why it feels different yeah that's my point it's like you're talking about the strength curve is the same yes strength curve is the same but the feel is different it's totally explaining why the feel is different the feel feels different is because the when the bands are attached to the bottom it definitely feels safer with them at the top 100% because you know that you can feel them you can feel their assistance when you're at the bottom of the squat when you somebody holding like fingers on the outside to kind of help right yeah i like to go when i'm going more intense i'll attach them at the bottom with the bands and i'll go heavy bands when i want like i'm going to heavy heavy weight but it's going to be a little easier in my joints i'm attaching them at the top that's just a feel thing so so there you have it barbell squat masterclass look if you want more help with health and fitness go to mindpumpfree.com and download some guides you can also find all of us on social media justin is on instagram at mind pump justin i'm on instagram at mind pump to stefano and adam is on instagram at mind pump adam