 Today's squatting variation that I want to discuss is squat holds or squat isometrics. So isometric just means that the length of the muscle is not changing, therefore I'm holding the position. So what does it look like? As I squat down I can hold it right here just for as long as I can. Okay? And this teaches me how to breathe in this position and maintain a position that is or forced me into a squatting position that's a little bit more restful for my body. It encourages me not to hold my breath because I'm doing it for so long that I cannot do that and it encourages good respiratory function. Right? It encourages my rib cage to move, my pelvic floor to move, and to accommodate all of those respiratory changes. So this exercise is really good. It doesn't require any space. If you don't have any load and like I have my phone here, but that's probably not heavy enough for me, right? So I can come down and I can do a squat hold. I can just hold it for as long as I can. I train my endurance a little bit more. It's not quite a strength exercise, but it still gives me a good training effect. So that's using the squat hold as an exercise. It's pretty simple, right? It doesn't require any equipment and you can just drop down, get your ankle on, right? What I want to talk about now is using this hold as a cue for your squat. So I got this from my buddy Jay Chung over that I worked with at IFAST and he had this post on IFAST University called Freeze. What he would do is whenever somebody was out of position, he would say Freeze, okay? And that would allow them the time to be cognizant of the mistakes that they were making and it would allow him the time to change it. It gives them the the ability to mess around with it a little bit. So if somebody's squatting and they stick their butt way out like this, this is too extended of a back position for most people, right? I generally want people more here, okay? I can feel my heels in the ground better. I can feel my hamstrings better when I do that. Now if I'm stuck here and I might give a cue to fix that first, I might say, you know, keep your hips underneath you as you squat down, you're kind of sticking your butt out. But a lot of times that just doesn't make sense to people and it doesn't fix anything. So what I can then do and what I can then try instead is come on down, go really slowly on the way down and I can say Freeze, okay? I want you to hold right there. I'm going to walk over. I just want you to exhale, reach your hands forward, change your hip position. That's much better. Now you can bring your hands back. Do you feel where your heels are in the ground more and they'll say yes or maybe they'll say no and if they say no, it doesn't really matter. If they say yes, I know they're getting it a little bit more and I can say, okay, I want you to hang on to that position while you come back up and I want you to get there again as you come back down. Same thing for, you know, a single leg squat or whatever. If somebody is, you might say, put your foot down, come on down and freeze. Okay, do you see how your knee is coming in? You're shifting your weight over a lot into your knee. What I want is for you to shift your knee out just a little bit. Okay, now hold on to that. Okay, that's just another example of what you can do. So consider using the isometric squat as not only a training tool, but also as a cue for you to fix your squat, increase your mobility and tweak your form better off.