How LOW Should You Squat (IT MATTERS!)

The depth of your squat is one of the most important aspects of your leg training that you can get right. Not doing so will have you facing the repercussions on your body, particularly as you continue to attempt to add weight to the bar. In this video, I’m going to show you the best way to determi

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. So how deep should you squat? Well, if you look like Jesse here when he’s squatting, I’m going to say, “Not that deep.

” The reason being, that evident butt wink he’s got going on there. “Butt wink”, for those of you that aren’t familiar with it, is when your lumbar spine goes into this position of extension, or neutral, into this rapid flexion, right back out of it when the squat gets to a point where it’s too deep. When I say, “too deep”, I mean too deep for Jesse. And when I say, “too deep for Jesse”, I mean too deep for Jesse right now. We should all be striving to get as low as we possibly can.

As a matter of fact, if I’m going to get off this ground at some point, from this position, I need it to be deep, and need to know, and have the strength to be able to get out of here. So, the most functional position of squatting is one that will take us a low as possible. But only if your body is ready for it. So, I’ve put together a checklist for you to determine what might be causing your body to do what Jesse did, because he’s certainly not alone. We all know that.

And how you can attack these things one by one. So, ultimately, when you fix your cause – what’s causing you to do this – you’re going to be able to squat safely, ass to grass, and go as deep as you can. So, we’re going to knock these out one by one. It starts here with Jesse being down. There’s a reason he’s here, by the way.

Not just to showcase the bad squat. It’s to showcase that we have some things that could be causing the problems here. One is the hip capsule mobility issue. Meaning, the tightness in the hip capsule itself which is causing a limitation in your range of motion at the hip. The second thing is an anatomical restriction of the hip.

That, again, will be restricting your range of motion, and we’re going to have to be able to determine the difference between the two. But both of them are going to limit your ability to get low. The third thing is a pelvic muscle tightness. Namely, in the hamstrings, or the adductor muscles. Then we have ankle mobility and flexibility issues and pelvic stability issues.

All of these, or any combination of them, or one in particular could be causing you to be losing the control of that spine at the bottom of the squat. The first three, ironically, are supposedly – you’re able to screen these out with the use of this convenient test that Jesse will show here. You’ve probably heard it before. People say “Look, if you can get into this position here, and sit back to a point where you’re low enough in your squat where your hips are past your knees. Below your knees as they would be in a fully performed and executed squat.

If you can still maintain an anterior tilt here – meaning, you still have the ability to get into a curvature here, not that you have to maintain that throughout a squat – but if you can still maintain some curvature here; there’s no way you have a capsular mobility issue, or anatomical restriction, or pelvic muscle tightness. They use this test as the example. I’ll tell you right here, this test is absolute garbage. Garbage. Why?

Because it’s not complete. Here’s why. If I were to take out this goniometer here – we measure angles o f the body with this thing. If I were to go in here and measure the angle of Jesse’s torso, while it looks like he’s below his hips, it’s actually deceiving. If I come in here and angle this to his torso here we have about 95 degrees on torso.

95 degrees. If he were to sit back – for you guys that can creatively look at this – if we were to tilt him back up this way, he’d actually be falling backward. Jesse, go ahead and sit up into a squat now. If he were to go back where he just was, he’s going down. Instead, what we need to do is measure where Jesse is in his squat.

At the bottom of the squat. Go ahead and get up. If we measure at the bottom of the squat here, now he has more of an angle of about 131 degrees. So, 131 degrees of flexion here to get down. Now, the normal range of motion for a hip is around 120-125.

If I have to get him back in that position and recreate that he can’t stay up here like this. What he has to do is, he gets into his anterior pelvic tilt, he’s in that deeper position of the squat, and now he’s got to bring his chest and everything else down toward the ground. Now, he’s lost all this. It’s all gone. He doesn’t have the ability to do that anymore.

So, we can’t rule out those other issues. He could be having – now that we’ve actually gotten into the true degree of flexion that he’s going to be in for his squat – we could be dealing with a hip capsule mobility issue. We could be dealing with an anatomical restriction. We could be dealing with pelvic muscle tightness. Here’s the thing, if you try this test, you’re able to get down here and you still – I can’t demonstrate on Jesse – but you’re still able to keep that anterior tilt; you can skip ahead in this video and go down to four and five.

Start looking at your ankles or your pelvic stability and we’ll time stamp those areas for you. For those of you who have lost your ability to stay in an anterior tilt at this point, you need to stick with me now and go through them one by one. So, the first thing now, if we’re going to look at that capsular mobility of your hip is, you’ve got to lay on the ground. You don’t need someone like me to do this for you. You can do it yourself.

But what you want to do is see how easy it is for your hip to get up into flexion here. Normally, we’re looking for at leas 120 degrees. 90 would be there, but we’re looking for about 120 degrees of flexion. What you’ll find is people that either have degenerative hips, or capsular tightness overall, and they start to lose the ability to get flexion here. They certainly start to get a hard end-feel.

Meaning, it hits here, and it won’t go. It’s like hitting a wall. Here, Jesse’s got that bouncy end-feel. So that’s another thing to look for. Once we get here, let’s say we have an anatomical restriction going on.

We’re not going to be able to instantly determine whether or not it’s anatomical – meaning the bones are hitting the bones – or it’s more of this tightness in the capsule. What we’ll do is, if he hits a wall here, if I turn his leg out a little bit toward you guys, and I’m able to go a little further; then we’ll probably think we’re dealing with more of an anatomical restriction. Which will happen if you test it a little bit further on here. But right now, if he can get up here, the next thing I would do is test his internal rotation. I’m just going to turn his knee in.

So, the foot comes out toward you guys, the knee goes in, and I’m looking for about 30 to 35 degrees here from here. So, if I go here, and I’ve got that, I can tell you right now, anyone with real capsular restriction is going to have a difficult time internally rotating. They’re going to have a difficult time getting into flexion. If you are good there, you can move onto the next step here, where we’ll go after that restriction of the bone on bone and see if that’s what’s going on with you. So, we’re moving on now and looking for a way to figure out whether we’re dealing with more of a muscle tightness here, or if we’re dealing with more of the acts of bone on bone.

Anatomical limitations. You can see what happens here. Why would this even matter, first of all? Well, let’s say we’re taking this hip here and going deeper into flexion. Going deeper into the squat, deeper into the squat.

What happens is, at a certain point here, the femur doesn’t have anymore room. It can’t cont