Sunday, September 05, 2010 - Scheduled Rest Day

Scheduled rest day today.

Arching your back in the squat. Here are a couple of questions that Marc answered on Elite FTS regarding squatting and maintaining an arch.

I'm having a tough time keeping my upper back tight with bigger weights when squatting. Do you have any exercise suggestions that might help remedy this issue?

Make sure you have your thumbs around the bar, and pull them in some if you can. If they’re lying on top, you can’t lock in the upper back as tightly. This will squeeze your shoulder blades tighter, and give you more to hold together.

On the big weights, you have to pick the bar up with the hips. If you trap it out, you never get the upper back set to begin with, and when you pick it up, there isn’t much you can do to tighten up or pull your shoulder blades tighter.

As you descend with the bar, arch even more so the bar stays in perfect sync with the hips. The more it stays with the hip, and the harder you arch, the more tension you generate, and the more power you’ll get out of your squat.

When I box squat below parallel, I can keep the arch in my lower back. I feel that this is because my lower back is weak. Should I focus on strengthening it? Should I lighten the weight and just work on my arch as I progressively work lower from parallel on a box? Or is this a technique issue, and would altering my stance help keep me in an arched position?

This sounds more like both flexibility and the inability to hold your arch below parallel.

I always arch harder and harder as I get to parallel and below. This keeps the bar closer to the hip and makes the squat easier.

On the second part, if you duck your feet out too much on your stance, this will make arching harder. The straighter you are, the more you can usually arch.


Here are a couple of videos of Marc "Spud" Bartley talking about arching your back while squatting and doing some box squats with 955.