Deep Squats, Shallow Thoughts

Achieving The Standards 1.0 - 135 press, 225 bench, 315 squat, 405 deadlift - is more important and useful than getting down to 10% bodyfat and it's not even close.

There's some individual variation but ya, most people naturally want to stay more upright and need to be coached into leaning over more than they want to, and driving hips instead of lifting their chest out of the hole. IMO rip has over-exaggerated this in the way he teaches in response to this tendency now, but the core insight is correct. And also yes - biomechanically if you do this right, the quads have to still do a bunch of work, whether you focus on them and feel them or not.

@wolfstrength IME, after learning LBBS form, it can be very useful to focus on using posterior muscles, as an internal cue. My body, anyway, wants to default to using quads. I need to consciously train it not to, to progress past a certain point. Quads still get plenty of stimulus.

A lot of people get this wrong: The low bar squat for general strength purposes isn't just a bar position, and it's also not a "maximize weight within whatever tricks you can get away with while still getting a white light" for powerlifting. It's purpose built to achieve a general, broad adaptation across the entire system. Powerlifting benefits from the development of general strength, but developing general strength isn't the same as powerlifting. There will always be some individual variation among lifters for anthropometry, but hallmarks of a low bar squat for general strength development are: -bar sits just below the spine of the scapula, not halfway down the back -stance about shoulder width -toes out so as to facilitate depth and include more of the ab/adductors and small/deep hip musculature -depth about 1-2 inches below parallel. Deeper isn't better for our purposes here, as some of that musculature we want to train must relax to get deeper -controlled descent, not slow but also not divebombing down, both so depth can be accurate and also so as to incorporate all the musculature as part of the eccentric phase, and keep everything tight and engaged, not relaxed -the drive up appears to be initiated and powered by driving the hips straight up into the air (not backwards), while keeping the torso angle relatively stable for the first half of the ascent. In reality this involves a lot of quads, but to appearance, what we see most notably is the hips drive straight up (NOT backwards) Doing what is effectively a high bar squat where the bar happens to just be held a little lower down your back isn't getting you the same training effect as doing the above Doing a vertical shins squat to where you sit way back til your thighs are roughly parallel to the floor isn't getting you the same training effect as doing the above

Rare case where I wouldn’t even be mad if someone was using the squat rack for arm work: Dead stop rack overhead tricep extensions / French presses were a Pat Casey favorite (Casey was the first to break the 600 pound bench press barrier in the 60s)

@DesertShepherd5 Risk: 8 gazillion Reward: negative a billion Simple calculus really

@wolfstrength I've also heard deadlifts are not worth the risk. Rethinking everything.

My honest reaction anytime someone says they don’t barbell squat because it’s not optimal for targeting the quads

@JackedBasedMgr I'd rather they be more expensive and keep more people out who I don't want there. The same people who'll drop $300-500 on a weekend night out without a second thought will complain about an entire month of membership at a good gym being $75 or $100? GTFO.

Have you ever seen a gym advertise bi weekly rates ? As pub gyms rise above $100 a month I bet we will see new ways to advertises… bi weekly, weekly, etc. Less sticker shock when you don’t do the math ?

One of the persistently funniest things about online coaching is how rare it is for clients to give me information that I obviously need. Not bad clients who don't listen anyway and then drop out after 2 months. Great ones who I've been coaching for years still have this issue. What do I mean? A great example is someone who normally trains 4 days a week, let's say Mon/Tues-Thurs/Fri. The upcoming week he has a business trip that will involve travel and all day meetings on Thursday. He'll tell me he can't train Thursday and that's it. Not whether it'll only be 3 sessions that week, on the usual other days. Not whether he can push off a day to finish on Friday/Sat to get all 4 in. Not whether Friday is also out because of the work trip and he intends to do Friday's workout on Saturday, in which case I might rather him do Mon/Wed/Fri total body rather than Mon/Tues/Sat split with one workout / area wholly missing and untrained. I just get "can't train Thursday." This happens even after I bring up the issue and how to to fix it numerous times. Just seems to be A Thing. Only a very few remember and give me the info I need to actually plan around the trip.

@ADAlthousePhD Great minds

@wolfstrength Hahaha I saw your tweet just after I posted mine! Sorry bout that.

We got American “gym rats” out here like “DeAdLiFtS hUrT mY bAcK” and Taiwan has 89-91 year old grannies moving weight @sam_gzstrength @wolfstrength

@ADAlthousePhD They have an official hall pass to do the trap bar x.com/wolfstrength/s…

Yeah, yeah, high handle trap bar, I know. Sensible enough modification given the advanced age. I’ll allow it.

I’ll allow it

Another good analogy to add to my collection It’s truly something else how many people built their own base primarily or at least substantially with classic old school barbell lifts, then after they’ve done so and can apply more advanced technique on top of that base, tell absolute beginners never to touch the barbell in the first place.

Safe: you don’t get to burn the beans then claim beans taste bad. You don’t get to do the exercise wrong then claim it’s dangerous. Effective: doesn’t mean they’re the only exercises anyone should ever do for the entirety of their lifting career. But they’re unmatched for novices to build a base with, and highly useful for 99% of people thereafter as well - along with the overhead press which should really be grouped among them as main lifts (Big 4).

The reason there’s a thriving market in posting “hot takes” that any of the Big 3 basic barbell lifts are ineffective or dangerous, is because it’s obvious via thousands of people over numerous decades, that they’re very effective and safe when performed correctly with proper load

Squats. Absolute waste of time for straight men. They gave me enormous legs relative to my upper body, wide birthing hips and an absurd big momma ass. The damage was permanent. I was told they'd make me "strong overall" but this was a lie. Only women and homosexuals should squat

@NolleyWayne @psypharmacopeia 95%+ of people just need to master the basics before doing anything complex or fancy but nobody wants to hear that and it doesn’t sell.

@wolfstrength @psypharmacopeia Which might be true if you’re competing and fighting a plateau. But for most folks, especially older guys, the SS program is all one needs. Stay consistent, add weight, get stronger, live better.

Yeah, I would hope it’s different, as I imagine the trainer and his client are at very different levels of fitness (it’s a safe bet that the trainer has a MUCH higher work capacity, in addition to better neuromuscular adaptation to the lifts, etc.) If I tried to put middle-aged, gen-pop, newbie gym-goers on my current program, it would fucking kill them (hell it’s always on the verge of killing me!)

@PaxElectronica @DBZYuYuYasha @xwanyex This is twitter so I don't expect an academic thesis reply, but "I don't believe" is doing a lot of work. I'm feeling lazy so using Grok to summarize - since 1983, the data appear to further back Sowell's core claims even more than they already did then: x.com/i/grok/share/5…

@DBZYuYuYasha @wolfstrength @xwanyex That’s not a rebuttal

This is why I think you have to be willing to bite the bullet and say that, even if this is true, it’s not an argument for an increasingly authoritarian and invasive racism-detecting apparatus, but rather it’s an argument against multiculturalism itself, evidence that we’re just going to have to accept a certain amount of racism, because what would be required to detect all of it is genuinely intolerable.

@SandyofCthulhu I’d watch the hell out of some Morder, He Wrote

So Rings of Power is a flop. They lost more than 60% of their viewers in the first season, after spending a billion dollars. I think part of the problem was that they kept messing with actual beloved characters from Lord of the Rings, instead of telling different stories. Middle Earth is huge. There are lots of things they could do besides pollute the franchise. Here are five ideas that I think would be a LOT more interesting than the Rings of Power. 1) a "Cheers" type comedy set in the Prancing Pony in Bree. 2) the adventures of Bill the Pony and how he got back to the Shire. You KNOW that story's fire. 3) a mystery show about Sam's old gaffer solving crimes in the Shire. Called "Mordor, He Wrote". 4) an action show about a team of warriors patrolling the north to protect Eriador from bandits, trolls, orcs, wargs, stone giants, and so forth. It would be titled, "Walker, Thangorodrim Ranger" 5) the hijinks and strategems of the two blue wizards as they try to thwart the machinations of darkness in distant lands. Kind of a buddy action-comedy.