What you should be doing instead of back squats

Earlier in the week I wrote about back squats and why for most they are a very difficult exercise to get right. The message that I finished with is that is a bad idea to attempt a weighted back squat when you can't do an un-weighted squat with proper form.
 
So where do you go from here?
 
The obvious answer is to do un-weighted squats, or very low weight squats and build it up gently. After all, you will not be overloading the joints like you would be with a heavy squat. This is a simple answer, and although I adore simplicity in exercise and health, sometimes it just doesn't cut it.
 
The problem with this approach is that you are not teaching your body to move differently to how it has been. All you are doing is re-enforcing a faulty movement pattern that has developed over time.

The low intensity will means you probably won't get any stronger as the muscles will not be overloaded.
 
So, you can spend the rest of your life squatting poorly with light weights and not working at the correct intensity to strengthen or improve anything; or you can do something productive, overload your muscles, and develop the ability to back squat safely all at the same time.
 
Here's what you need to do.
 
Regress the squat to a pattern which you can perform and train flexibility through broken down movement patterns from the bottom up.
 
Squat regressions all have one basic principle; they provide you with a forward weight shift which means that you need to have a less extreme range of motion to perform the lift. You won't be able to shift as much weight because the regression puts you at a mechanical disadvantage when compared to a back squat. .
 
Examples include

-          Elevating the heels, with a plank, some small plates or weight lifting shoes.

-          Putting the weight on the front, like a goblet, extended arms or front squat

-          Providing a forward push/pull, wall ball, TRX or Cook band squat

 

 
Excluding any injuries or joint pain, I guarantee that there will be a combination of these which allow anybody to perform a squat while their mobility is inadequate.
 

Now we have found a way to overload the muscles, we need to improve the mobility in the most efficient way possible. This always begins with self-myofascial release, or foam rolling. For those of you unfamiliar with this it operates the same principle as sports massage, but you can do it yourself. I am not saying that sports massage has been made redundant, as a good massage is better than anything you can do yourself, but this is a good alternative.

 

Identify what your limiting factor is in your squat, it is probably one or a combination of:

-          Calves

-          Knee flexors

-          Hip extensors, abductors, adductors

-          Thoracic Spine flexors

-          Scapula retractors

If they are tight these need releasing every time you train and before you perform any warm up movements.

Secondly, rebuilding correct movement patterns. We are programmed to develop our squat from the bottom up. When we are children we begin by squatting, then we stand. We don’t do it the other way round. The exact exercises require to build a squat are too complicated to explain here, just remember the order of progress.

 

Perform these movements as a warm up to your squat, constantly pushing as far as you can go whilst maintain immaculate form. Slowly build to a full, bodyweight overhead squat, then you’re good to go.

You’ll be amazed at how easy it is when you are using your muscles correctly.

 

Back squats, why you probably shouldn't be doing them

The pursuit of improved health has become a minefield of misunderstandings. Public perception is that performing the exercise is the simple part, you just stick your head down and do it. It is thought that you can just read a few exercises in a magazine and join a gym, do the programme and then you'll get results.



Nope, without the correct direction, or a much better source of information followed up by detailed study, the exercise is technical and very easy to get wrong.

Take this example, have you ever heard that squats, particularly deep squats, are bad for your knees?

They might be, they might not; the truth is that it depends on the individual and how they perform the exercise.

The squat is not a dangerous exercise, poor mobility makes the squat seem dangerous.

There are no exercises I can think of which when performed with correct from by a person free from inhibitions, would cause injury.

So where did this squatting myth come from?

The truth is, unless you are under the age of 12, you train mobility or you are exceptionally lucky, you are very unlikely to be able to squat with correct form. This is because your body operates on a 'use it or lose it' basis. No flexibility training for a decade? You probably won't be able to squat. 

In order to perform this movement you need to have excellent mobility over your entire body, any weaknesses will be exposed by a squat. To see whether you have this ability here's the acid test.



Stand with your feet straight, shoulder width apart, holding a dowel above your head with straight arms. Sit down as low as you can so that your bum is as low as possible.

It is slightly more complicated than this but there are three things that must happen

• The dowel must be above your feet and your head
• Your spine must be roughly parallel with your shins
• Your heels must stay on the ground

As I said, most people can't do this. It is difficult.

So when most people can't do this, they make compensations to perform a movement similar to the squat. Bending the knees inwards or outwards, leaning excessively forwards from the hips, shifting onto their toes are all classic examples. But the majority of people who read magazines read that squats are the best exercise to build mass, to lose fat etc. and so they carry on regardless.

What do you think happens when you put your own body weight on your back and attempt a movement you can't do when un-weighted?

Bad news. but it happens all the time, and as long as these problems aren't addressed you will never have a good squat, neither in technique nor performance. Even worse than that every time you perform the squat with poor form you will make it harder to correct the compensations you have developed. 

I am not going to say that you shouldn't be doing squats. as that would be ludicrous. What I suggest is that you perform a regression of a squat until you are capable or the range of motion necessary.

Dead Lifting - King of Exercises

What is the best bang for your buck exercise in the Gym? The Pull Up is a good one, or it could very easily be the front squat.

I don't think so, it's the dead lift. Nothing demands more, and nothing has as many benefits in terms of stability, mobility, strength, hormonal response and more important of all, feeling strong. Feeling strong is most of the battle when things get tough, and they don't get much tougher than a good dead lift.

Form
First and foremost, a dead lift is not a squat with the bar underneath you. It is a similar movement but recruits from a different motor pool. It is much more hamstring and glute focused  rather than quad dominant and the center of mass is further forward.

• The bar is resting on the floor, reset after every rep.
• Bar over the middle of your foot
• Your shins should be near vertical
• Thighs near 45 degrees
• Back flat
• Core engaged
• Neck Neutral
• Shoulders over the bar
• Hands shoulder width apart
• Scapulae retracted

The cue is to pretend that you are pushing the floor away from you, your hips and knees should move as one. Fully extend together at the top of the movement, to complete a rep.

 

The worst case scenario for a dead lift leaves you feeling it in your lower back, and nowhere else. What you should feel the next day is 'that feeling' from the back of your knees, all the way up to the top of your shoulders, and all around your abs. The dead lift defines 'whole body exercise.'

I love the front squat, but the reason I love think the dead lift is a better exercise is that it is more available to most people and offers a lot of the same benefits when it comes to posture. Most people can't do a good front squat straight off, most people can do a good dead lift from the off. 

Having said that, people often struggle with technique on a dead lift, 90% of the time it is because the weight is too heavy. However it is not uncommon for people to have weak links which limit their potential. These must be addressed if you hope to improve without injuring yourself. 

Some common solutions to common problems:

Shrugging the weight up at the end of the rep

• The chances are the scapular adductors are weakened due to poor posture. During the dead lift you are hanging the bar off your ligaments in your shoulders, rather than with the muscles. Then when you stand, and the weight is reduced, you are re-engaging your muscles. 
• Perform a dead lift hold; hold the bar with a supinated grip standing as tall as you can. Hold on and feel the muscles in your upper back being pulled down. Resist, this will build the necessary strength to hold the bar with your muscles during the deadlift. 

Excessive Lower Back Fatigue

• Could be one of a few things
• Lack of hip mobility
• Lack of core strength
• Weak or unstable hip extensors 
• Poor technique due to excessive weight
• Rack the dead lift up by starting from a raised position. Place the bar bell on a couple of plates or a platform and perform the lift from that position. Focus on technique and drop the weight, squeezing your legs through the movement.
• Alternatively perform the top down Romanian Dead lift. 

Struggling with grip

• Your legs are stronger than your forearms.
• Use the deadlift hold at the end of the session to improve grip strength. 
• Use an alternate grip, this prevents the bar from rolling out of your hands
• Use a lower volume higher weight programme
• Use wrist straps

Ending the pursuit of perfection

Recently I had a thought which I would like to share, to do with how training relates to happiness. 

At RWL we have a phasic system of training. First we instill habits into our clients, to teach them how to eat healthily. While we are doing this, people get in better shape. So without taking anything too seriously, like counting macro-nutrient ratios and calories people are becoming healthier looking better and most importantly feeling better.

Then we begin to individualise their programme. This is for people who have a good understanding of the habits and want to take things more seriously. Here we give people specific plans and strictly control nutrient intake, leading to the final goal.

After this goal is attained we have a maintenance phase, where we back off a bit. Return to something similar to what we were doing before and just keep things how they are.

Except in practice the third phase doesn't really happen, because whatever people achieve, they always want more. The fact is, when it comes to appearance, people are never completely happy.

We are all our own harshest critics and it is incredibly difficult to look in the mirror and not find improvements which could be made. There is always someone better than you in life to relate to, and I think it's good to chase them, to continue improving, but you have to be realistic.



So, how long does this quest for perfection continue?

Probably forever, because I believe that the pursuit of perfection provides the happiness more than the achievement of goals. I say this because if the achievement of a goal provided sufficient and continued pleasure then people wouldn't continue to make new ones. It must be the process of achivement which provides the pleasure. After a goal date, there is almost always a sense of, 'Now what?'.

This realisation has allowed me to come full circle on a couple of beliefs which I have held for a while now:

1. Happiness is not a destination at which you arrive, it is a state of mind which you choose to have. 
2. Goal setting is only useful as a tool for the measurement of success, as opposed to something which defines success. As long as you're making progress, you're succeeding.  

So what do we do with this information?

For starters you need to be able to look at yourself and acknowledge that improving your appearance will probably not make you any happier. However the pursuit of great health can improve your happiness.

Identify what you value, what you're passionate about, and spend as much time as possible indulging those passions. For some people that is working out, and those people are figure models, but if that's not you, then don't kid yourself that it is.

Training and good nutrition will make you energetic, it will make you strong, and it will make you feel better than you ever thought possible. But most importantly it will allow you to enjoy life to the fullest. 

Let go of perfection, because chances are that isn't what you really want. Just commit to improving, and become the best possible version of you.  

An apple a day keeps the fat loss at bay

What makes a healthy food? 

High fat?
Low sugar?
No additives?
High protein?

Honestly I don't know, I don't think anyone does, and for that reason as far as I'm concerned there are very few unhealthy foods out there. In my opinion most foods in appropriate quantities are acceptable. 

Except for soft drinks, they're just evil 

What I can advise you on is whether or not the consumption of a certain type of food is likely to be beneficial in achieving your goal. 

An example:
A client interested in improving body composition recently asked why we asked her to keep fruit intake to a minimum. I thought maybe there might be others who are interested, so here it goes. 

If you've read previous posts then you are probably aware of the impact of insulin sensitivity and fat loss. Basically the less sugar that goes into your system the more insulin sensitive you become, and therefore the more fat you should lose. This is a simplistic view of the process but if you would like more info then click here. 

Take this common example, look at the nutritional information of an apple, it is almost entirely composed of carbohydrate, and so yes even though it is low in fat and it's got lots of vitamins in it, that doesn't mean it's good for losing weight. 


In fact a large apple has 23 grams of sugar in it, that's almost as much as a Cadbury's Creme Egg (25grams). 

They're the facts. If you are on a low carbohydrate diet, because you're reducing insulin resistance, keeping fruit intake to minimum makes sense. But there is so much more to fruit than just sugar. 

Let's take the same apple; over half of the sugars in the apple are fructose. Good news! Fructose doesn't require insulin to get absorbed by your muscles. This means that no matter how much fructose you eat, you will never lose insulin sensitivity. Perfect. 

Not quite, as always there's a catch. 

Above is how the cell manages the glucose you eat in the absence of fructose. 

As you can see, at the top of the crudely drawn diagram glucose in the blood is being transported into the cell due to the presence of insulin. After which it is being metabolised and producing energy. Great news. 

However when fructose is present, it slows down the metabolism of glucose or even reverses it, leaving the glucose to sit in the blood. While the fructose is being dealt with, increasing insulin pressure means glucose has nowhere to go other than into fat tissue.

Not good.

Fructose metabolism also directly increases the release of fats into the blood, which means even more fat tissue. 

Even worse. 

This all sounds pretty awful, but the good news is that from the amount of sugar in an apple, the effects are going to be small. In fact you may not even notice. What you may notice is that it is that your fat loss is not as good as it should be. 

So, to make it as easy as possible to lose fat, moderate the fruit. 

Where you will find a significant effect is in soft drinks. They contain a huge amount of high fructose corn syrup, which as you can guess from the name, contains a lot of fructose. 

So, we've come full circle. As I said, soft drinks are evil. 

Refs

Fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/76/5/911.long

Dieting: why some people can't lose weight

Have you ever considered the question why some people are seemingly unable to lose fat? 



The world in which we live is a seemingly obesity prone place, just look at the statistics that you read in the media. There are a few obvious answers to the question of why some people struggle with weight and others don't, including eating too much, drinking too much, skipping meals etc. 

I don't think they're the most important things.

From my own experience many different shapes and sizes of people come to me, and they all have problems with their weight. The quantity and quality of the diets I see do not seem to correlate well with how much fat they want to lose, or are losing. 

Yes, there is almost always a history of  poor food habits, but these often  have improved to the point where their food  journal does not indicate someone who is struggling like they are. 

People are doing the right things but not losing weight!

Let's look at things which are consistent with obesity prone people

• Yoyo dieting
• The people who seem to be most lost are those who have 'done everything'. They have done all the diets, all the exercise programmes, even hired multiple trainers. But each time they make a resolution to change they find themselves plateauing and regaining it all back.
• Age
• As people age, it becomes harder to control weight. This is evident in all populations purely through observation. At the same time we all know young people who eat loads of junk but have good body composition. 
• Low energy levels
• This one is always there, in my experience people who struggle to lose fat always comment that they have low energy levels. 

These factors are something which I have been aware of to a degree but unfortunately have never given enough conscious thought; never enough to actually link them together.

So we've got people who constantly relapse on diets, people who are older, and people who don't have a lot of available energy. 

It seems obvious now, doesn't it?

No?

They have a metabolism which has adapted to being underfed.

Yes underfed, when people are young, they eat what they want and they get enough calories to stay alive. In fact many have more than enough calories to stay alive. But in terms of nutrients they don't get enough. 

So what does the body do to deal with this, it slows down the metabolic rate. Meaning that the body doesn't need as many nutrients to stay alive. Every single day the body is using less and less calories creating a continually larger energy excess, which is stored in the body as fat. 

When they decide enough is enough they lose weight through cutting calories, and it works. 

But what happens to their metabolism? It slows down even more.

Skip forward a twenty years or so.

The person is now at breaking point, it seems whenever anything other than broccoli goes into their mouth they put on weight. Even though they are consuming only rice cakes and water their weight won't shift. 

The fact is they are in a supremely efficient state, where nothing short of starvation will alter their body composition. What happens next?

Well if they have any sense they'll come to us. 

We encourage these types of clients to eat more, 5 meals per day for starters. We aim to put them at as much of a metabolic advantage as possible. We get them interval training instead of traditional cardio training to boost it even further. Until the point where they are begging us to reduce their food. 

Answer this question:

Who is going to have an easier time losing weight; someone maintaining their weight on 1000kcal per day or 3000kcal per day?

At this point they have tonnes of energy, the cravings have halted and for the first time in years they actually feel good. Then we alter their diet slowly, eeking out every bit of that fast metabolism they have worked for. 

And then it stays off for good. 

So tuck in to some good food. You have my permission.