 Hello everybody, let's talk about safety squat bar squatting. For those of you who don't know, a safety squat bar is kind of like a barbell in the fact that it can sit on your back like a normal bar, but the handles, instead of holding the barbell back here, which requires a pretty significant, not insignificant at least, amount of shoulder mobility, you can hold handles that are in front of your body and there's less torque going through your shoulder. This is really important. A good training tool for keeping the shoulders healthy. If you're a higher level powerlifter, especially, or even if you're just kind of stiff in your upper back and shoulders and you can't really find that position, the only comfortable position you end up finding, you see these guys, they grab the collars when they're squatting. And that's the only way to alleviate the rotation that they need. So the safety squat bar is a good way to take that tension off, even though it's not the same as a barbell squat, it still helps them get some lower body training volume. So what it would be, I don't have one with me, but you would set one up on your back, your head goes through these little pads that are in the middle, they go up here and around your back and you'd stand up with it and you hold these handles right down here. So outside of the shoulder saver component to this, there is also a difference in the load that you get. So with the pads, especially if you look at a more traditional elite FTS model, I'll link to that below. If you look at that, the pad is pretty thick and it brings the weight, or it brings the bar a little bit further away from your body. So the safety squat bar requires, because of this, it puts a lot of extra torque on the hip and on the back. So it requires a little bit more of an upright posture. So you can't adopt this low bar bent over hip dominant squat quite as much. You need to be a little more upright, a little more knee dominant. This change in torque can be really useful for athletes especially, saves their shoulders. You know, if you have like a baseball athlete, that's perfect for them. They don't need to back squat. All they need is some lower body training stimulus and they need to save their shoulders. So that can be very good for them. To kind of compare and put it in a sort of progression of sorts. If you think the front squat is super upright and the back squat is pretty bent over, not quite a deadlift, but really close to a deadlift, then the safety squat bar is not a back squat, not a front squat, but somewhere in between here. Okay, so think about that. Think about how the torques are going to change things. You can use this implement. If you have it available to you, they're not that expensive. You should get one. They're just a great training tool, right? So you can use this as a different method or as a different mode of training your squat. You don't want to back squat every day for the rest of your life. You will acclimate to it and you will no longer challenge your body that way. So you need to teach your body to stay a little bit general. Even if your goal is to increase your back squat, there's still this foundation you need to lay before you can progress all the way up to the top of that performance pyramid and lay on strength and lay on speed and power.