 Let's talk about squatting with a belt. So when you're powerlifting, oftentimes the big limiting factor is this midsection here. If the spine collapses, then I can't get the force that I produce from the ground to go up into the bar and then the bar crushes me and I can't get that lift. So a good way to overcome that is to increase the pressure that is in your abdomen. The first way that I would do and the way that I would recommend for most clients is to make a fake belt but with your abs and with your core muscles. So I exhale, I brace everything and then I inhale into it and I try to keep that pressure there, keep this internal stuff pressurized and then I can hang onto that while I come back up and everything feels stiffer. Everything feels like I can produce more force. The same principle works if I'm wearing a belt. So if I have a nice big thick lifting belt, I wrap it around, I put it as tight as I can get it kinda but it doesn't have to totally suck all of myself in, right? Because I'm gonna need to have something to breathe into. I'm gonna need some sort of pressure and I don't necessarily want that pressure. I don't want this belt to be sucking me in so much that when I breathe in it all comes just straight up, right? Cause I don't need the pressure there, I need the pressure here. So maybe not quite as tight as you can get it, maybe about a notch looser than that, maybe a notch or two. But it's the same thing as using your abs, right? So that belt creates the abs. You still wanna use your own abs and you still wanna breathe into that belt. What I like to think of is if you're looking from the top down here and you got the belt around you, I want that belt to expand in all directions as you breathe in. Sometimes people are really good at breathing forward but not so good at breathing backward and I would say more than sometimes. That's really often the case. What I want you to do, what I want you to focus on and think about is instead breathe backward. Just try to breathe backward cause then you'll end up coming into this like middle ground area where you're breathing in all directions. It's really difficult. Oftentimes if you have trouble with this, these people are squatting with their backs arched a little bit more and they don't have this good position where their pelvic floor here can receive the pressure. And so the pressure gets pushed forward cause now I've closed my back this way and the pressure falls this way. So to maintain that, we just have to make sure first and foremost that we have a good hip position as we're squatting and then we can start to create more tension and then we can breathe into it and use that to increase our lifts.