 Today, we're going to talk about front squats. If you've never done them before, I'm going to walk through exactly how to do them. And if you have done them before and maybe your knees bother in you, maybe you feel like you can't get low enough, maybe your back doesn't feel good or maybe it just feels wrong just in general. It just feels wrong. We'll stick around because we're going to run through all of the common mistakes that people make and how to fix them. The front squat is one of the friendliest lower body exercises for keeping the body kind of loose but still allowing you to really load your legs, get a nice hypertrophy growth and get stronger. The place that people most often mess up the front squat is in the setup. So it's even before the execution of the exercise. So we've got to make sure we get the setup correct. Now normally I would set the bar up high in a rack, but I don't have a rack here in my filming studio, so we're just going to clean the bar up to the shoulders. And from here, I don't want to hold the bar in my hands. That's the first mistake people make is they engage this upper body too much. Now you don't want to rely on the shoulders to hold the bar up. You want the bar to just rest on the body. You should be able to take your hands away and still hold the bar. Okay, don't shove it into your neck too much because there's blood vessels there that might prevent you from staying awake. I've seen it happen. Would not recommend. So from here, there's a couple different ways that you can grip the bar. The first one, most commonly seen, is the one you see in the Olympics. That's what I'm doing here. My fingers are just kind of stretching and holding the bar back. They're not really supporting the load though. Remember the weight is on the shoulders. This one requires a lot of wrist flexibility, so if you don't have that, the ways around it are to start turning your hands. And my second variation that I like is just using your thumb back on the bar. So all my fingers are off the bar, but my thumb is on the bar. And again, my weight is still through the shoulder. It's resting on my body. It's not resting in my hands, so that's a good one to do. And the simple one where you don't need any extra equipment is just to cross your arms in front of your body. I might say this is a crossed arm position or I might call it a bodybuilder style. In any case, whichever grip you decide to go with, make sure the elbows stay up high. That's what's going to prevent you from crunching over. Now once you have the optimal grip set up, you're all ready for this exercise. You've got to make sure those elbows stay up. You're going to spread your feet a little bit. I don't want to go super wide on the front squat because I want, I would say about shoulder width stance here. And then I'm just going to push the butt back and break out the knees at the same time while I squat down. Now the beauty of the front squat is the load is on the front of the body and it shifts your body back. It gives you more hip mobility, so I can actually sit way down here. And that's why you'll see a lot of Olympic weightlifters do something like this. If you don't have the ankle flexibility, you might need to elevate your heels. If your heels start coming up, you've gone too far. So let's see a whole rep. So, feet are together. I'm going to set my stance and then I'm going to sit my butt down and then come back up. Now this is nice, slow and controlled. Just make sure the knees and the hips lock out at the same time. Get a good butt squeeze at the top. One of the biggest mistakes to look out for once you've got your set up down is when you get to the bottom, you don't want your elbows crunching down. That shifts the bar load into your arms and makes you a lot weaker. It also moves your spine, puts you at a little risk for an injury. So we don't want that. Make sure that elbows, you're actively thinking, push the elbows up and forward as you descend. So they have to come up and forward more as you come down and that will keep the bar back on your shoulders and not shifting forward into your hands. Our next most common mistake is not keeping firm pressure of the foot in the ground. So as you come down, you've got to make sure that your heel doesn't rise up off the ground and you're not shifting so far back that your toes are floating off the ground. We want nice even pressure all the way through the arches of the foot the whole time. Another common mistake is misaligning the knee. So we don't want the knee to fall outside the line made by the hip and the ankle. Nor do we want it to fall inside. Either one of these is twisting and tilting the knee, putting extra stress through the ligaments and the other soft tissues of the knee instead of keeping the load going straight through the joint and using your muscles to do all the work. So what that might look like is as I squat down, if my knees splay apart a lot, oftentimes people do this when they have really stiff posterior hip capsules and they can't get the depth for the exercise. So two things to think about there. One, don't go so low. You might just stop here and you might feel better quad and glute involvement as you're doing the exercise. And then two, the other thing, you can just try to push down through the arches of your feet the whole time. And then if you do that, your knees can only go out so far. Like this is about as much as they can go. And it's a little too wide, but it's not too egregious. So that'll help fix your problem. The other knee alignment problem is the knees caving inward. This is a knee valgus or a knock knee position. This is really common in people with loose ACLs, prior ACL, MCL, meniscus injuries, this is kind of your most common knee injury. So for something like that, we've got to make sure that the glutes stay active even as you descend. Oftentimes what happens here is you can keep the knee position on the way down, but then when you press up, the knees collapse. Part of that is just you have to learn what it's like to rebound out of the bottom with your glutes and hamstrings instead of just pushing with your hip flexors at the bottom. Because those hip flexors will cave your knees inward. So if it looks like this when you're going or it looks like this when you're going, you might need to lighten the load. And you definitely need to make sure you stay sitting back, driving through your heels, even as you push back up. The last mistake that I see a lot of is extra spine movement causing the squatting motion. So when you come down, you don't want your back to round more to get the depth. You want to load the hips. If the back rounds, you're loading the back, not the hips. So make sure you keep the pressure in your hips and in your legs the whole time. Anything that makes your legs burn is good on the front squat. So keeping that just like that and then as we come up. So the decent problem that people normally have is around their back. The ascent problem is that people will arch their back. And so people will arch the back in order to not lock out with the glute. And sometimes the knees will even stay unlocked the whole time as well. So big fix for that one, the one that I find the most helpful. You still want to think about anything that makes the legs burn is good for this. But as you get to the top, you want to just make sure you get a good glute squeeze. Feet stay flat, glutes are squoze. If you squeeze your glutes and you push your hips forward and your heels come up off the ground, that is generally pushing too much with the low back and not just keeping the load on the glute. So that's a suboptimal. Oftentimes people will, you'll cue them on that. And then they'll do it this way instead. And you're like, yeah, you did what I said, but not what I meant. So just make sure that when you come down, your back's not rounding. And when you come up, your back's not arching. All right, that's gonna be it for me. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. Hopefully you feel like at this point, your front squat is pretty much perfect. There's maybe some minutia, but the biggest thing is make sure you're limiting your depth, make sure you're stabilized with the spine and make sure you're loading the legs. And usually you're gonna be okay on that one. It's okay if you limit the weight to something that your back can do, but even if your legs could do more, right? So you have to train that somewhat. So this is still an upper back exercise. It's still involved. Even though we think about it as a leg exercise, there's still upper body stuff going on. If you need something else to watch, I got a whole series on coaching exercises. You might like some of those.