 Let's talk about squatting with a bar on your back when it hurts like hell. Okay, so I've been squatting for a long time and I've been lifting for a long time and I do lower body exercises and, you know, like deadlifting, right? If I deadlift, I hold onto a weight and then I pick it up and it tries to rip my arms off my body and I just don't let it, right? So all of that develops this upper back musculature. That gives me some cushion when I put a bar on my back and it supports these weights and, you know, I'm used to it, right? I can put a bar on me and I can say, all right, that might be kind of uncomfortable but I've done this before and we're okay. So for someone like me and maybe you who has trained pretty regularly, it might be really hard to empathize with somebody who is a little bit smaller and feels really tender when they put the bar on their back. So that cold hard steel is pretty unforgiving, right? And if I am a 95 pound woman and I step under this bar, it's gonna crush my scapula, my shoulder blades, right? And there are some bony protrusions on that scapula. You'll even get your spine comes out here and there's this little prominence of one of your vertebra that also can jump out and you can irritate it by putting this steel on it. Okay, so make sure if somebody's complaining about this that parts of it can be real and parts of it may need to be addressed. You don't want to irritate the skin too much. Also, there's this effect on the other side that you get used to it, right? So keep that in mind. But if you are, if you're setting up and you're finding it really uncomfortable, maybe you or somebody you're helping with your lifts or with their lifts, finding it uncomfortable. Couple of things we can talk about. So I wanna make sure that the bar sits on the medius part of your back. So my upper trap here is a really good shelf to put this bar on and I can even bring my shoulder blades back just a hair, right? I don't wanna pinch back like this because that will destabilize my spine and make me weaker but I can bring them not totally forward but back a little bit so that there is a shelf to put the bar on. This shortens the muscle, the muscle starts to overlap and it gets thicker and it creates more of a cushion. So that's step one. Make sure you're putting the bar in the right place. If that doesn't work, you can wrap a towel around the bar. Sometimes that even helps with creating this faux padding that can then compress. So when someone like an experienced lifter is lifting, they get that muscle to compress because the weight is pushing onto the muscle and that gives you more friction, keeps the bar where it's supposed to be. But if you don't have that muscle to compress and if you're just sitting on bone, not only is it uncomfortable but you have less sense of where the bar is. So what I would say is first, get that position. Second, you could wrap up a pad or a towel around the bar to get some cushioning. Outside of that, there are other variations you can do. A safety squat bar is difficult in the sense that the bar is heavier. So sometimes when you're first starting out, if you weigh 90 pounds, 95 pounds, it's difficult to squat the bar for the number of reps that you may need to be doing. So it may be too difficult to jump up to a safety squat bar because those generally weigh anywhere from 60 to 80 pounds but that is an option. Those generally have pads around there and they decrease the point force that you get on your back. Outside of that, we could try something else, right? We could get away from a bar or, you know, one more bar variation we could try as a front squat. That one tends to be uncomfortable but uncomfortable in a different way there. You can use this as a barter tool. Hey, you thought that was bad, try this one out and then they'll be like, oh, the back squat, that's okay. So if that's the MO that you have, feel free to give the front squat a try. If not, most people can get a pretty good training effect out of a goblet squat where you're just holding something in front of you like let's say my phone, hold the weight in front of you and you sit back down like this. Now the big limiter there is if my phone is really heavy, my arms have to hold it and they have to have one, the strength to do it and two, the endurance to keep going, keep my position while I'm squatting down. So if you don't have the upper body endurance to support it the whole time, you won't get that leg training effect. The other thing is if I hold something, if somebody can't squat the bar for 10, they're probably gonna hold like a 10 kilogram kettlebell or something which is a lot less weight. And so you need that upper body to support it but that weight might not be enough for you to tire your legs out. So just some stuff to think about. So maybe you try a different variation, make sure you have a good position of the bar on your meaty shoulder blades there and outside of that, just keep training because you'll develop muscle, you'll get desensitized to the uncomfortableness that is holding the bar and you'll put on a little bit more muscle to support you.