 Today, we're going to talk about the front squat, which is a squat I learned from the most beautiful man of all time, Anatoly Pizarinco. This is Alexis, and I'm going to teach her how to front squat today. It's called a front squat because the bar is in front of your body instead of behind the body. I know it's amazing, hard to believe, but that means that the grip is going to be different. It's not going to sit just below the spine of the scapula. In fact, it's going to sit across your front delts instead of across your rear delts. So you're going to take a grip. It's actually about your deadlift grip. You're going to wrap your thumbs around the bar. You're going to throw your elbows forward. You're going to step up underneath the bar, throw your elbows forward, and what we're looking for here is nearly parallel humorous. That's right. The higher the elbows are, the more muscle mass you have to set the bar on. Take a deep breath and stand up. Now, I'm going to point out a few things about the grip. We've got a parallel upper arm that looks great, good shelf on your shoulders, and you've got a good grip on the bar. For people that have flexibility issues, they might lose their pinky or even their ring fingers off the bar and just be able to hold the bar with their first two fingers. That looks great, right? Another thing we can do with flexibility problems is take a wider grip. So if you have a shorter humorous and a longer forearm, you'll have to widen your grip. Okay, so another way to grip the bar in a front squat if you can't get into a front rack is what we call the California grip. I think it was called that because the bodybuilders in like Venice Beach did it this way. So what you're going to do is cross your wrists, and the bar will kind of be in the webbing of your thumb, but the weight of the bar will still sit in the exact same spot. Humerus is still going to be at parallel or above if possible to see what that looks like. So cross your arms. Yep. Bar in the webbing, just like that. That's right. And stand up tall. Walk back. And the key here is still to lead with the elbows. If you keep your elbows up, the bar won't fall out. That's a California grip. So for people like me that have a short humorous and a long forearm that can't get in a good rack position, you can actually do the same movement by adding straps to the bar. And you'll just set it up like this. So we've just wrapped the straps, the normal wrist straps around the barbell, draw your elbows forward, close together, and stand up tall. Walk back, and it'll look just like that. So the difference in the front squat and a low bar squat that we normally teach is that in a low bar squat, almost all of the body or the majority of the body is going to be behind the gravity vector. So it's going to be behind the barbell, behind the midfoot. And so all those muscles of the posterior chain, posterior being the back of your body, are going to get extra worked. Your hips are going to be more closed. Your knees are going to be more open. Your back is going to be more horizontal in a low bar squat. In a front squat, it's the opposite. As you get down to the bottom of a front squat, you'll notice that much more, a much greater percentage of your body, is going to be in front of the barbell, mostly your knees. And so that means that your knees are going to be more closed, your hips are going to be more open, and your back is going to be more vertical rather than more horizontal. And that means that the quads and the muscles that control the front of the knees or the anterior side of your body is going to get more work on a front squat than on a low bar back squat. Just like that, elbows up and in, close together, like that. Stand up tall, walk back. All right, now the goal here is to keep a relatively vertical torso. And the way to do that properly is to think about keeping your elbows up. Lead with the elbows. You're naturally going to hip drive. Let your knees come forward and out. Actually narrow your stance just a tad. It's going to be just a tad narrower than a low bar squat. And to send in your squat, do not bounce off your knees. Go down slow, up fast. Good, tiny bit deeper. Good, just like that. Stay on mid-foot. Lead with the elbows out of the hole. Lead with the elbows a little harder out of the hole. Lift the elbows here. There you go. I want you to think about rib flare. I want you to widen out your ribs, flare them out. Don't think about lifting your ribs up real high. One problem that a lot of people have is they'll overextend their thoracic back, their upper back. They'll overextend it. So as they come up out of the hole, they can't hold that overextension. They go to normal extension and the weight jumps forward. By flaring your rib cage, you provide a solid base of support for the barbell, for your ribs, for your shoulders, for your hands. Everything is where we need it to be. So flare your ribs out as you go into your descent. Go down slow and up fast. Good. And eyes are exactly where they're supposed to be dead forward instead of on the floor. I want a neutral neck. That looks great. Let's do one more. Good. Walk it in. Touch your uprights. Lead with those elbows a little closer stance, just a tad. Good. Good. Lead with the elbows on the way up. Lead with the elbows out of the hole. Elbows up. There we go. It's better. One more time. Elbows up hard in the bottom. Elbows up. Good. All right, so one thing that's interesting about the front squat is that while most people do the front squat to get additional quad work, they'll notice that the butt gets sore. And that's because really two primary muscle groups extend the hips. That's the hamstrings and the glutes. But because the hamstrings are shortened already in the bottom of the front squat, the only thing that really gets stretched in the bottom of the front squat from the posterior side or from the hip side are the glutes. E-centric loading is typically what makes us sore. And eccentric loading is the muscle lengthening under load. So when you're going down slow and your glute muscles are going from short to longer and more stretched out, that causes some microtrauma really to the sarcomere, to the sliding filaments that are contracting there and causes some inflammation and you'll often get sore. So a lot of people when they first start doing front squat, they think their quads are going to get sore and they might. But they're often surprised how sore the rear end gets because it's doing work for itself and for the hamstrings with a low bar squat, the hamstrings get to contribute more. So let's talk about why we would do the front squat at all. So first off, for an Olympic weightlifter, like a competitive weightlifter that does the clean and the snatch in actual competition, a front squat is a very specific type of squat that they have to do to get out of the bottom of the clean. So really all Olympic weightlifters are going to do a front squat. For everybody else, we would much rather them do a low bar back squat because it uses more muscle mass, more weight, and probably about the same range of motion as a front squat. Front squat for almost everybody is going to use less weight and less muscle mass. So why we use it? Well, for an advanced lifter, it's still a perfectly acceptable option as a supplemental lift on a four-day split after the main deadlift. So it's just a perfectly good supplemental lift that you can use. The other thing that is nice about a front squat is if you have a hip injury or a problem with like a labrum tear or any sort of osteoarthritis in your hips because the front squat is going to close the knee but leave the hips open. If your knees are healthy and your hips are not, this could be a viable option for you or for anybody with hip problems. So it works pretty well. One of the things about a front squat, because the bar sits on your neck often, like obviously the weight of the bar is on your delts, but because it's so close to your neck, it can cut off the blood supply there at your carotid artery and we could have some oxygen problems, some blood to the brain problems if we're not careful. And we tend to do these for lower reps. So reps in the one to three range. And we would often get our volume on a front squat with adding additional sets rather than adding additional reps. So things like five sets of three, four sets of three, top set of three back offsets of three, top single and some back offsets of three. That would be more along the lines of how we would program this rather than a typical three sets of five, four sets of five, five sets of five on the front squat. And a lot of that is you're just going to lose air. It's hard to breathe in the middle of a front squat while it's often closing off your trachea, right? Like you often can't get in air very well. So most of these will be performed on one big breath to perform the entire set all three reps. To learn about more great squat supplemental variants. That was a lot of words. That was a lot. And most of those were taught to me by cons in the United States as opposed to Olympic lifting gold medalist from Russia. You can click the squat playlist right up there.