Originally published on July 3, 2017
This journey started with me wanting to punch a brilliant track coach, Chris Korfist, in the face. Over a year later, it will end with one of the biggest revelations in the sports performance industry. In part one of this article series, I will reveal why 99% of our research and the criteria by which we have judged the squat for athletic development is wrong. This is a bold statement, but it is not a theory, it is an irrefutable fact and I will show you why. Before your mind starts racing, this is not the same old article arguing about 1/4 squats vs. full squats or powerlifting vs. Olympic lifting style squats. This is a mind-blowing discovery that speaks to a much more fundamental issue. That issue is how we have been incorrectly analyzing the squat for athletic development by using faulty evaluation criteria and it must change. At the end of this article, if you take nothing else out of it, you must learn that the terms “depth” and “parallel” are arbitrary and have absolutely no place in athletic development training.
When I started this process, it literally gave me an anxiety attack. I was not only angry but I had a hard time accepting my own logical conclusions. What I will present is not a hard concept to understand intellectually. Emotionally, it may be extremely hard. It was especially challenging for me because I have sacrificed a lot of my body for the sport of powerlifting. In 2004, I herniated my L5/S1 disc doing an 1100-pound squat. I went from the 4th highest total in the world all-time and having my name on the board at Westside Barbell, to not being able to dress. I worked my ass off to get back to the platform and was able to win the 2014 WPC deadlift world championship. I love and have more of an emotional attachment to the sport of powerlifting than most people on this planet. However, this article is NOT about the sport of powerlifting. It’s about an exercise, the squat, which just happens to be an event in the sport of powerlifting. This monumental distinction has created a huge amount of confusion in my life and in our industry and is the beginning of the problem we are faced with today.
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To be able to walk you through this discovery, I need to make sure everyone is on the same page. That begins with stating a simple truth: muscles adapt to load based on the joint angle and range of motions through which they are worked. This is pretty basic. But this is where it starts. Accepting this also means accepting that nobody gets stronger based on where they are in space or where things are relative to the ground. The most self-evident way I can describe this is that if an athlete lays flat on their back on the ground, the crease of their hip is below their knees and their thighs are indeed “parallel" to the ground. Yet, because my knee joint has gone through 0 degrees range of motion, there can be no strength gained in the hamstrings or quads. Super simple, it is joint angles that determine strength gained, not where something is relative to the ground. Let’s move on.
Before I explain how it is that we have all been so misguided, we must first define how we analyze and evaluate the squat for athletic development today. The two pictures below accurately portray the false lens through which we have all been looking at the squat since the inception of the sports performance industry.
What do you see in this picture? By most powerlifting standards, and for sure by strength coaches standards, this would qualify as a “parallel” squat. This parallel definition would then make it a “good” squat in most weight rooms around the country. As an aside, it would also hit the research standard definition of “parallel” which is around 100 degrees of knee flexion. Before we go further, let me remind you, this is not an article on 1/4 squats vs. parallel squats vs. ass to ankle squats. DO NOT even start to go there. This is an article that will revolutionize how we analyze and evaluate the squat for athletic development in our industry.
Now take a look at the squat in this picture. We all know that this would never pass in any powerlifting federation in the world. And it shouldn’t! It would also be considered a quarter squat by every strength coach I know.
For many years, I would define a squat as a full body movement, with the load on the upper extremities, that is initiated at the hips and involves the person going down until their hip joint was even to or below the knee joint, and coming back up. The problem is, this is NOT the definition of a squat.
This is merely the definition of a legal squat in the sport of powerlifting. This “parallel” definition has nothing to do with the squat or what it is. It is just an arbitrary rule that was made up as part of the defining structure of a sporting competition, namely POWERLIFTING. If you read Bryan Mann’s book Powerlifting, you will learn that Bill Clark and two other guys, in a room in Missouri, decided at the inception of powerlifting, 50 or so years ago, that this “parallel” definition would be the judgment criteria of a squat in the sport of powerlifting. This “parallel” definition in the sport of powerlifting has somehow become the word of God for all squats done in the world. Whether those squats are done by a powerlifter, gym-rat, high school, college or pro athlete, they have been held to the parallel standard and there is a huge flaw in this logic.
If everyone is going to use the arbitrary sporting rule of “parallel” to judge if a squat is “good”, then they must apply all of the other arbitrary sporting rules of powerlifting to all of the other lifts as well. There are Instagram pages dedicated to making fun of people not squatting to parallel. In a lot of weight rooms, if an athlete doesn’t squat to parallel, it is not counted. Everyone who uses parallel for their guidelines of a squat, and they are not working with competitive powerlifters, is a complete hypocrite. As much as it pains me to say, I used to be the biggest among them.
If you use the powerlifting rules for squatting, in order to not be a hypocrite, you must also use the sporting rules for the bench as well. In all my years, I have never seen a strength coach yell at an athlete bench pressing who didn’t come to a complete pause with the bar on their chest, wait for the “press” command and not put the bar back until they got a “rack” command. Yet, these are the rules of the bench press in the sport of powerlifting. I know what you are thinking, “athletes are not powerlifters, there is no need to follow the powerlifting rules of the bench press for athletes”. Exactly! We are both on the same page. There is absolutely no reason that athletes should ever follow the rules of powerlifting for any of the lifts; bench, deadlift or squat.
Parallel, like other powerlifting rules, is irrelevant to athletic development. The only thing that matters for athletes is that they move the weight through the joint angles needed to produce a positive performance outcome for whatever sport they are playing. Following the rule of parallel for athletes is as illogical as giving press and rack commands in the weight room to those same athletes. It has zero influence on helping their performance in sport. Yet where are my “No Rack Command” Instagram pages?
Apparently, we can stringently enforce that one rule of the sport for everyone who squats, yet ignore all others. This is obviously ridiculous and illogical. Yet that is what we have done for years. Again, I am as guilty as any. This ridiculousness needs to stop. Our industry must change how we analyze and evaluate the squat for athletic performance and that is what I hope to accomplish with this article.
The squat is just a means to an end. A movement idea or an exercise if you will. It is a tool for us to use to help our athletes become better at their sport. Whether I lower my butt four inches or drop until my butt is on my ankles, as long as I bend at the hips, knees, and ankles, the load is on my upper extremities, and I come back up, I am squatting. Now obviously, in the sport of powerlifting, you must hit depth and go to parallel, as that is the rule of the sport. For any athlete, other than a powerlifter, you should never hold them to this standard as it is irrelevant to their athletic development.
In the beginning of the article, we all agreed that strength is gained based on the range of motion through which the joint travels. To illustrate the point that “parallel” and the term “depth” has absolutely no place in athletic development training, let's go back to our previous two squat pictures.
In this picture, which most every strength coach and powerlifter would consider parallel, I have drawn the joint angles that are reached with white lines. Now, we can all argue on exact angles and “depth” but again, please resist the urge as that is not the point of the article. The knee flexion in this picture is about 95-100 degrees, which by research and most weight room standards, is a parallel squat.
Here’s where our profession has gone totally wrong. Instead of analyzing joint angle range of motion to see if the athlete is getting the necessary strength gains through the range of motion needed, we have all applied the powerlifting rule of “parallel” or “depth” to influence how we analyze and evaluate this squat.
Just 18 months ago, I too would have looked at the 2nd squat, illustrated in this picture, through the lens of the sport of powerlifting. I would have used the terms “depth” and “parallel” to shape the focus of my coaching. There is no doubt that in a powerlifting meet, as I have drawn in with the lines, this squat would be about four or five inches high. This lens of depth and parallel would have forced me to yell at this athlete for only doing quarter squats. Eighteen months ago, I would have never allowed this squat in my weight room. But I would have been wrong.
I want to make clear that I still believe in good full range of motion squats, and as a powerlifter, I’ve always seen that as going to parallel. The problem is we have all been trying to apply rules from the sport of powerlifting to athletic development for other sports. You see, he is not a powerlifter, nor is he competing in a powerlifting meet. He is an athlete and my job is to make him better for his sport. This meant I had to make the biggest shift in the way I looked at movement since I have gotten into this profession 20 years ago.
The picture on the above illustrates just how wrong, myself and everyone else in the sports performance industry has been. Not only that but it shows just how arbitrary our definitions of certain squats have been. If you were 100% good with the 1st squat, and we have already agreed that strength is gained through the joint range of motion worked, then you must be 100% good with the 2nd squat shown in the picture here. This squat is in fact not a quarter squat, it is exactly the same range of motion squat that we showed in the 1st picture.
All I did was take the exact same lines from the 1st squat, group them together and rotate them. The fact is, the joint angle range of motion through the knee is the exact same in both squats! I will repeat it again. If you were “good” with the range of motion in the 1st squat, then you must, by your own admission, be “good” with the range of motion in the 2nd squat. It is the exact same range of motion in both! Go back and look at all pictures if you must.
I’ll let you take a minute while your mind blows…
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The problem with what we have been doing is that we have been applying the rule of a sport, to shape how we analyze and evaluate a movement that we should be using as a tool to improve athletic development. To get more specific. The real problem is that no one has been looking at one of the most integral joints for athletic development, the ANKLE.
When we squat, we utilize the ankle, knee and hip joints. All three of these joints must produce force for strength in not only the squat, but for sports performance as well. In any analysis for the squat, whether in your weight room or for research, if we do not define the angles for the ankles, knees and hip joints, then we are giving an incomplete picture of what is happening in the squat. This was made abundantly clear in the pictures above.
I know many of you are going back through the pictures, but it is undeniable, we have been analyzing and evaluating the squat for athletic development incorrectly this whole time. More specifically, we have been evaluating it incompletely because we have left an essential joint out of the analysis. Factoring the ankle in is essential for both the big picture of the squat and for athletic development.
I would have never gotten to this realization had it not been for brilliant coaches like Chris Korfist, Cal Dietz and Ian King. All I did was take partial concepts that they have spoke about for a long time and put them together in a way that made sense for a big meat head like myself. Honestly, If you're not finding this to be difficult to accept emotionally, then you're a better person than I am. This took me a long time to come to terms with.
Now that we have unequivocally proven that “depth” and “parallel” are totally irrelevant terms for athletic development and that we have been evaluating and analyzing the squat incorrectly, I want to provide the correct way to evaluate the squat for athletic development. That starts with consistent terms and proper definitions for what is happening in the squat. Without this, we can’t even begin to argue about what type of squat is best for athletic development. In Part two of this series, I do just that.
The Squat and Athletic Development: How We Have All Been F*cking It Up — Redefining the Squat
But I understand now!
Thank you JL! Great article
As a track & field coach we use and have used for many many years different depths when squatting or doing step ups. As you so correctly point out ankle mobility is a crucial part of the squat. Then you have the fact that there is a carryover of 5-10 deg from the bottom position that you gain strength. So if you stop at 90 deg I knee joint it will carryover to around 80 deg. There has been to much time and confusion spent on doing cleans, snatches etc correctly based on weightlifting as a sport. As an example is doing a snatch the best option or only option for a shot putter. Both yes and no, the snatch as a whole movement should be thought to all young athletes, but for a word class athlete it should be used in the first phase of General preparation and from there it should progress to hang snatch and block snatch and finally only high pull. We must also think of the neuromuscular adaptation and what this means for learning or refining technique in the sport that you are doing. The word is progression from global to local from General to specific unless we are trying to have polevaulters and long jumpers that are weightlifters that can vault and long jump rather than the opposite athletes who can lift in a manner that has carryover and effect on my event.
My question is this - yes the two squats have similar/identical knee angles – but they do not have the same hip or ankle angles and thus will have different moment/lever arms for the quads/hammies/glute/gastoc, etc. What do you make of this?
One thing I really like about this part 1 that parallels why I like RPR so much is that the idea is having people think about their intent and questioning their core beliefs. Dave talked a bit about this on Strength Chat with Duffin.
I can only imagine Korfist asking you why you would ever bother pushing depth! Wish I had seen it!
Would it not be reasonable to assume that the first squat develops the hips more than the second? And that based on that reasoning wouldn't the first squat would provide a more comprehensive development?
Read this for a simple explanation and follow up with the actual research articles for details.
This article does highlight the need to look at your exercises in a sport specific manner. For example with cleans and snatches, you can argue that for a football player or similar athlete, catching the bar in a high catch position (versus a Olympic style drop squat ) matches the deceleration angles at the knee and hip, in a more sport specific way that mimics the reversal strength needed to run and cut.
I think every tennis player in the world is proud of us now.
Why in the hell would anyone "coach" an athletein a sport they aren't competing in?
Ego? Most likely.
You haven't addresses the depth, or I guess in this case, the angle of squat relative to muscle activation?
We all know that anything less than that 90 degree mark is essentially just an upper quad workout. The greater angle of attack represents a greater load on the hamstrings and the glutes. Now myself personally have always been quad dominate. I came from the sport of track cycling years ago and made the transition to Bobsled so I've been playing catchup with my hamstrings and my glutes for the last several years. How do you address squat angle with hamstring and glute activation. I have yet to meet an athlete, myself included, who needed more quad work vs hamstring/ glute work. Thank you in advance for the response. Very good article.
I train high school, college, MMA athletes and I never try to get my basketball players to squat to parallel. They never do it on the court!
If it's goIng against the grain it'll always get my attention, nice to see it addressed by an actual powerlifter.
Can't wait for part 2!
(Btw, to me that's not even a quarter-squat... maybe a half-squat, but a 1/4 would be even higher).
A better question: Why use the squat anyway? There are safer, easier to learn exercises that will make an athlete stronger and more injury resistant. This is splitting hairs. An athlete should move his or her musculature through a safe range of motion for them as individuals, work hard enough to induce an adaptive response, rest and recover, and drill for their sport.
So while a agree, it seems like nothing new, it is completely new.
The best way I can put it is that for the first 14 years of my life, I knew I had a penis, knew what it looked like, and knew it was there, but once puberty came, it changed my whole understanding of what it was for and how it was used. Think of this like puberty for the squat.
I disagree on your statement about less than 90 degrees being quad work. Without knowing what the ankle and hip angles are, you cannot properly assess what muscles are being recruited and to what degree. That is the point of this series. There is too much arbitrary information.
Ex: If I only bend to 60 degrees in my knee flexion, but keep a relatively neutral shin angle and go into a high degree of hip flexion, I will load the crap out of glutes and hamstrings. This would by most folks be called a goodmorning. This is where part 2 put rubber to the road and defines all this so we can all discuss and debate what is best for sports performance from a common lens.
As it stands, you made a statement about a certain style of squat without defining the primary joint positions, which leaves way too much room for error in the debate. We must all use common language that accurately reflects what is going on in the body.
Hope that helps, let me know your thougths after part 2.
I like the article. I have a question for you. Do you think we should focus on optimizing or improving range of motion at the ankle as it relates to allergic performance? Increased ROM at the able joint would allow greater freedom of movement, thus improving squat depth, but more importantly allowing, in theory, more optimal sport performance.
What I think will be useful is a clear metric on how to determine what is right for each lifter. You've started the process. Looking forward to what comes next.
I train mostly high school, college, and MMA athletes, and I've never made my basketball players try to squat to parallel - they don't do it on the court!
If it goes against the grain, it usually gets my attention. Can't wait for part 2.
(Btw, to me that picture isn't even a quarter-squat, more like a half-squat; a 1/4 would be even higher).
-brendan
How about incorporating BOTH types of squats--a current standard "deep" squat--and an "athletic" squat?
Maybe "parallel" was chosen as a basis of SOME sort of standard to go by--and then just train off a best example of an achievable "signature" squat?
If doing the "athletic" (my term to differentiate--as it seems deeper than "half' squat)--how to get the trainee to STICK to THAT performance rep after rep (non"parallel" sighting to set standard of performance) --as fatigue has trainees naturally seeking to squat at less and less depth to make those last reps....doable? Else it maybe turns into a "power curtsy" with marginal/sub-optimal knee bend at all toward the end of a fatiguing set.
Not arguing here--just wondering.
Thanks!
As you may or may not know I was part of the Canadian National Luge team fro 1984 to 1992. My first 4 years with the team were truly my first exposure to resistance training and I can assure you that they were horrible. We were taught none to very little lifting technique, I got injured more during resistance training in the weight room than while practicing my sport ( keep in mind that we slide down a track our back at speed between 60-85mph brushing and/or hitting cement walls, so...). Long story short in 1988 this guy named Charles R. Poliquin became our strength coach and we started to learn that there were technical rules you should respect to have a successful squat. So from that day on I had to learn to do a "Full Squat" (calfs to hamstrings, keeping good spine integrity, knees inline with feet, and all the rest.....) once we achieved the "Full Squat" only then were we exposed to different type of squats. I never really heard the expression "depth" then, it was "full range of motion". That full range of motion squat is affected by many factors but we could arguably state that flexibility will be your biggest and most common limiting factor (spine, hips, knees, and ankles definitely as you mentioned).
You are not wrong at all with what you wrote. In my last 30 years in this industry I came to learn a great number of things, one of them is that the first thing one must learn is to, learn to lift. Lifting weights is a learned skills, lifting heavy is also a learned skill. When Charles R. Poliquin became our strength coach we quickly learned that there should be a purpose behind every exercise you choose. In that line of thought, there is a time for full range of motion squat but there is also definitely a time and/or need for "partial squat" (whatever that range is, 1/4,1/3, half or parallel). Having said all this, I am a strong believer that for athletic development everyone should strive to achieve full range of motion BUT it is very important to understand that it is not because you can do a full squat that you will automatically be able to skate faster, jump higher, or make the NBA league (those are different set of skills). It should however make you stronger.
In the same token I am also a firm believer that Powerlifter SHOULD NOT force themselves to achieve full squat (ass to the grass) because increased flexibility is NOT always the best thing for powerlifters. A certain degree of healthy tightness is a huge advantages to tolerate the incredible loads you guys can lifts. These are my thoughts I hope it was not too long and I hope it gives you the feedback you were aiming for (good or bad)? Thank you for sending me your article.
The simple heuristics used to evaluate the usefuleness of an exercise are:
1) Use the most muscle mass.
2) Use the most weight.
3) Use the greatest effective range of motion.
I am excited to see how the part two of this series improves on those criteria.
Not to say that full squats shouldn't be done at all but there is always a middle ground that many coaches and trainers do not want to find. The most important thing to remember is that we serve the goals of our athlete, not ourselves. Performance on the field is key! Joint angles combined with many other factors such as velocity are much more important than simply making sure an athlete simply "hits parallel".
JL has a great relationship with Cal Dietz and I've heard Cal speak many times and had several opportunities to speak with him 1 on 1. The first time being about 8 years ago during a conference. As a competitive powerlifter, my mind was blown then and still blown by some of the things that Cal and JL talk about. Seems as though there is a need for people to branch out and get some different information to help with their frame of reference. Keep it up JL! You're a very valuable resource to many of us!