 Hi, I'm Lance Coyke and today I want to talk about the overhead squat. So this is a weightlifting favorite exercise because in the snatch event as I clean or as I bring the bar up, it comes up, it hits my hips, I try to throw it as high up overhead as I can and then I catch it in an overhead squat, okay? This requires a lot of mobility and a lot of strength. It's a very challenging exercise to perform correctly and today I want to go through just that one piece of it, the overhead squat. So I might start by holding just my arms overhead or maybe something really, really light like a PVC pipe, bring them up like this, squat down and squat back up. Now if you think about a low bar back squat where you're bending over a little bit more, you're using more of a hip dominant strategy rather than a knee dominant strategy to help propel you up. You got to think about where your arms are going to go. So you can't adopt this powerlifting low bar hip dominant squat if you're doing an overhead squat because the limiter is your shoulder. This is the smallest muscle here, right? And as you bend over, the lever away from your shoulder gets longer and longer like this. I can't do a front raise with as much weight as I can squat on my back, right? So what we're trying to do if we're trying to lift the most amount of weight in an overhead squat is minimize that leverage. Now there's a couple ways people do it. Lots of people will just extend their back a lot, bring their shoulders as far back as they can and compromise their joint positions, weaken their joint positions so that they can achieve these, in my mind, undesirable positions, okay? The overhead squat is not a training tool that I really use for any of my clients. None of my general fitness clients needs something like that. I'd prefer to just teach the snatch as a whole and let you kind of figure out where that pattern is. If I'm going to catch the bar overhead, right? I'm going to need freaky amounts of hip mobility, freaky amounts of ankle mobility, full knee mobility, which some people don't have if they've had surgeries. Consider that. And I'm even going to need full shoulder mobility, full shoulder flexion to bring it back up this way. Sometimes I won't have that if I, you know, for my left shoulder, I don't really have it unless I kind of jack it up and force it. And this feels okay as long as I do one at a time. If I do two at a time, it's a little bit harder. My left or my right one comes back really easily. Left one doesn't come back quite as much. It's hard to do both at the same time, but I can achieve it. Some people are limited to here. Okay, those people should not be overhead squatting. If you're watching this, I've got plenty of other videos you can watch if this is you, okay? Maybe you need to try some more mobility exercises. Check out some of the ones that I have in my playlists here. And good luck. Reach out to a good coach. Maybe they can help you out. But maybe overhead squatting is not what you need right now. So going back to actually do it. Let's say you have full ankle mobility. You have full hip mobility. You have full shoulder mobility. Then what? Then what do we do? Well, it's a crazy ab challenge core stability exercise. So what I need to do is hold my positions like this. And then I can, if I have the weight, I get a little bit of feedback. So I won't get lazy about my arms coming forward. I'll be really jacking them back. I probably won't go, it's a little easier here than it is here. Just because of the active nature, I can sit my butt back down. My butt starts to come forward again. You see how it's back and now it's forward again. And that gives me a good position to then stack my joints. Stack the weight through my elbow, through my shoulder, through my midsection, through my hips, all the way down to my feet. Okay, so again, with the overhead squat, we're trying to limit this leverage. The stability demand of this is very high. The amount of weight you will be able to use is very low, comparative to say a back squat or a front squat, traditional squats, right? That doesn't mean, so you can look at this in a couple of different ways in terms of your squat progression. You can either say, I am progressing my stability demands by trying an overhead squat, or you could say, I am regressing my force demands by trying an overhead squat. I need to focus more on the positions rather than the weight that I can lift. And so for that, in that respect, this can be really helpful if you're trying to learn some of your Olympic weightlifting moves. But again, if you are just looking for general fitness, I would suggest you try some other things. If you're really interested in trying it, give it a shot, start with a PVC pipe, something almost weightless, and try to get the right positions. Watch yourself from the side, see if your arms are falling forward. If they're falling forward, maybe you need a couple of weeks with the PVC pipe, and then you can start to add extra load. Make sure you're throwing on the shoulder stability demands gradually and slowly. Don't just go from no weight to 135 on the bar, because you'll probably be dominated. So I hope you like the overhead squat. I hope you like my explanation. If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment. Sometimes they can, you know, cause a good discussion. And I open discussions. I like talking about things like this. Until next time, sayonara.