 Hello everyone, today I want to talk about a slightly more advanced topic with squatting. This is a little bit more for the coaches out there who want to understand really the nitty-gritty details of what's going on. Maybe you're just a lifter and maybe you want to help some of your friends. Maybe you really like understanding the nuts and bolts of everything. Then I think you're going to enjoy this. Else, stop watching, you're not going to like it. So today we're going to talk neutral, neutral spinal position during our squats. So what is neutral? That's a really good question. I don't know that I have a great answer. Generally what I'm saying is a neutral position is one that allows me to achieve my maximum mobility that my tissues will allow for. So generally, if I'm in a neutral spinal position, neutral pelvic position, I'm able to squat down really low with a hip width stance and my feet pointed straight ahead without hiccup. I'm not arching my back once I get to the bottom. I'm not rounding extra and shrugging my shoulders over to help me balance myself. I have a nice position. So that is kind of neutral, but then how does this pertain to heavy loaded squats? So if I'm doing a squat for mobility, generally I need more flexion and maybe flexion, meaning at the spine, meaning really everywhere, dorsiflexion, knee flexion, hip flexion, to get all the way down there. I need to unlock all of that flexion. If I say it one more time, maybe you'll remember. So the idea here is we need to unlock all of that. Now what if my squat is not for achieving more flexion, it's not for mobility, it's not for this healthy movement variability, it's not for control of my joints. What if it's for force development, power development, being fast? So instead what is happening when I squat 400 pounds or whatever, if I put the bar on my back, what is a neutral spinal position there? Now to me the answer changes and you can, it's hard because this is different, right? We need to redefine it if I am talking this, but in a heavy squat, a neutral, the word neutral is just telling me this is the position that will allow me to do the goal. So if the squat is a mobility squat, there is a mobility goal, a neutral spinal position has more flexion, has more roundness and allows for more mobility. If the goal of the squat is to load it, then the goal is then let's support extra load. Stack the joints so that we have the most compression that we can get and so that we have the most stability that is available to our bodies. Now the heavy loaded squat, so what happens? Once I put that 400 pounds on my bar, my spine straightens. It doesn't flex forward because flexion is weak. So straightening, I pack my chin up, I lift my head up tall, I lose my lordosis in my low back, I lose my kyphosis in my upper back, I lose my lordosis in my neck. Everything stacks on top of itself and this promotes stiffness. The bone is really good at handling compression. It's not good at taking blunt trauma to the side trauma to the tibia. That's how tibia breaks. But if I just stand on my leg, that tibia can hold that for a really long time. So we want to try to compress these structures, we want to compress joints. We don't want them trying to slide across from one another. We don't want to use them for anything else other than stacking. And that's what we're doing here. We straighten the spine out. The low back goes into slight flexion which locks the facets. The upper back, the thoracic spine extends a little bit which locks the facets. Similar things happen at the neck, I think. I don't really remember. Hopefully though, we're aligning the bodies of the vertebrae on top of one another. So hopefully you can redefine what neutral means to you and what neutral means to your client in a given time exercise context. Because context matters. And so we're going to have to be particular about these details if we're going to give our clients, give ourselves, give our friends the progress that they're looking for and the advice that they need.