potential high holy squat wars with physio. help me keep it civil - and also informed.

canadianlbs

this is the first time i've been in these shoes - confronting someone else's squat dogma with my own form of it. so i don't think my navigation skills are the best and i've got a vested interest in being constructive about it (75 bucks a pop, is how vested).

the problem.

- left shoulder that has been rear-impinged, weak, hypermobile and inclined to drop forward under a low bar placement, which tends to bring torque to my whole upper body on that side.

the setup.

- sports physio place. young guy but not green at all. has been very very extremely helpful about the shoulder itself. just purely as a shoulder.

the first shot of the war.

- i ask him today to specifically take a look at my position under the bar and provide specific suggestions and thoughts about where i'm mis-aligning and how to help myself keep it straight. we had very little time, in fact i was basically trespassing on his good nature a bit because my time was technically up already. but he gave me one of those fat weighted bars and then spared me a bit of attention while his next client was doing the stuff he'd assigned her to do.

the problem.

- basically, it seems like he might not ever have heard of low-bar squatting and/or believe in it. i don't know yet; i wasn't going to take up time another person was paying for arguing with him with half-recalled fragments of rippetoe lore. he was making the very good solid point that keeping the bar that low does put bad strain on the front of my left shoulder - essentially the front delt. exactly the thing i was hoping he'd help me with, but i was hoping he'd pinpoint ways of making my rear shoulder stronger so it can stop letting the bar push it around like it does. his initial solutions were so disappointing. basically:

- bar shouldn't be anywhere near that low. should be on top of your traps.
- i don't want you leaning forward like that.
- i don't want you going that low (i had dropped straight into a paleo crouch, so i'll give him a pass on that one this time around, but only until i find out how low he thinks i should go.

if anybody could help me out? i'm not even sure what i'm asking for really, but i've had my chiropractor voice the same kinds of objections as well - and neither one of these guys is a fool. basically they both had this instant reaction that low bar placement is disastrous for the front of the rotator cuff. and tbh in one half of my case (the left half) they have a pretty strong point. it's just i don't know how to talk them around to trying to work with me on making low-bar placement less disastrous, instead of this instant thing of 'high bar, vertical back, quad-heavy' ** stuff.

ETA: ** which i don't want to do, since the last time i did it was death on my knees.

Fittreelol

To be technicially right (the best kind of right) the top of your traps is on your neck. Or conversely if he meant it should be on your traps then low bar is also on your traps- just a different part of them.

You might be making your low bar a little too low (or not, but putting this here for anyone else curious). Some part of the bar should be resting above part of the spine of your scapula. You can find this by feeling for the acromion which is the bone you feel at the very top-outside-back of your deltoid. Then if you keep walking your fingers down and inside your back you'll feel a line of bone. This is where I get road rash from knurling on occasion. You won't be actually resting on this bone thought because you'll be flexing the bejeebus out of your upper back. Here is a nice picture google found for me of the spine of scapula surface anatomy:


To stregthen your upper back try adding face pulls and band pull aparts. Good how to on face pulls here:
https://www.t-nation.com/training/you-should-be-doing-face-pulls I do band pull aparts as part of my warmup, and do 5x10 face pulls on OHP and Bench day. Pretty light. I do like 15lbs the cable machine at one gym and like 25 on a cable machine at another gym.

Speaking of warmups. I do both uppper and lower body mobility+stability warm ups on every training day unless I'm really pressed for time. Squat and bench especially use a ton of the "opposite" body part.

I feel you on the knee death. I can't wear squat shoes because they make me knees travel too far forward (even with correct bar path) for my poor patellar tendon to handle.

Unfortunately the field of Physical Therapy is only recently adding evidence based treatments. Before that it was, "this is what we've always done it worked on these people so we'll keep doing it." So your physio might be adamant about these things because it's what he was taught, but they might not be right. For the record I'm not really against anecdotal based treatment- To the native americans the willow tree was sacred for many reasons one of them being it's medicinal qualities. Centuries later some german guy sythesized the same active ingredient and made asprin. The issue arises when you try to treat everything with asprin, and don't understand why it's not working. A really good PT should realize that "this might be what we've always done, but this patient also presents with x y and z so we'll try treatments 1, 2, and 3."

canadianlbs

thanks for this. i do tend to forget that 'scapular spine' just means the acromion, so that was timely. this guy was definitely talking high-bar though. he moved it himself all the way onto my upper traps, well above the acromion. the only bone in the picture was whatever spinal vertebra is in that zone. and then he came up with a variation that i've never even heard of before for my grip. flat hands, palms turned inwards, fingers pointing at roof with vertical forearms. and the bar basically just resting in this fork formed by separating fingers and thumb on each side. i said wasn't that dangerously unstable? and he said 'well, that's where your trunk muscles come in.' idk, that seemed like a pretty high-stakes kind of answer to me. but i guess my 'there's nothing wrong with forward lean so long as your spine stays rigid' would have seemed like the same thing to him if i'd been coherent enough to produce it for him.

Fittreelol

Yeah that part was just me being a smartass. "oh you want it on my traps, eh?"

MissHolidayGolightly

I probably wouldn't argue with him. I also wouldn't listen to him regarding how to squat.

This is similar to how it went when I'd ask the PT specifics about running mechanics so as not to injure my knee. I kept getting non-answers and things that didn't make sense. I just dropped it and figured it out on my own.

krokador

My PT told me to not squat below 90 degrees (that's even less than parallel) and to bring my feet in no wider than shoulder width and turn my toes forward completely.

Obviously I only partially listened to him. I've been squatting to decent depth, with a narrowed stance (but nowhere near as narrow as he was suggesting) and my feet turned in a bit more (but they slide out on my first descent so whatever xD) and oh hai! A year later my meniscus is actually feeling fine and not bothering me at all anymore!

So it's all to take with a grain of salt.

Also, in the defense of high bar squats: I can definitely feel them in my butt, hammies and groin area! They really don't shift the load to the quads that much. And my knees don't really go that far past my toes, either. Case in point:

So it really all depends on your body type and flexibility, to a degree. If the low bar puts too much stress on your shoulder the best thing to do IMO is to not aggravate it until you've solved the issue. If you can. Sometimes you gotta work with what you have - I don't know that I'll ever try to squat low bar again as it puts too much torque on the inside of my knees and adductors and they're really injury prone. No matter how much strengthening I do there I can never trust that it won't crap out on me. So be it, high bar squats work just as well, y'know?

MissHolidayGolightly

There is so much misinformation about squats floating around as well as personal tweaks that work well for some and not others that I'm skeptical when people spout their thou shalls. Low bar feels better for me but I also have held the bar wrong so that it strained my shoulder. Also, my knees feel great since squatting to depth with my toes angled outwards with a wider stance than what PTs typically say to do.

canadianlbs

tbh, i felt defensive and foolish because i'm self-taught, and i know as well as anyone else how much misleading crap the internet holds. it didn't help me at all to help myself making my case.

i'll let my jets cool for two weeks and when i go to the next appointment i'll kind of come in at the right door. i was thrown out of sync with my own brain at the time because i'd just emailed him my lifting list and specified that i do low-bar, so i'd been taking it as given that we'd be discussing low bar. i thing we were standing there arguing different components of squatting, without either of us stopping to clarify terms to start with.

but for all i know he has genuine objections to low bar form, which i might as well hear. it's also possible that he's never even heard of it, and he might have thought i was trying to do a high squat while leaning way out in front. in which case i might be able to show him what i'm doing, and see what he thinks when i've done that.

to do that of course, i'm going to have to get good at squatting with only a 15-pound bar. i actually can't do that very well; at least not with a fake bar on my back. the lack of real weight tends to unbalance me these days. hmm, maybe my form is crap after all.

thanks for the video, krok. idk if i'm just being a fangirl but i really liked your form. i see the giant rip on the shin too. it made me go ow just looking at it.

krokador

canadianlbs wrote: »

to do that of course, i'm going to have to get good at squatting with only a 15-pound bar. i actually can't do that very well; at least not with a fake bar on my back. the lack of real weight tends to unbalance me these days. hmm, maybe my form is crap after all.

thanks for the video, krok. idk if i'm just being a fangirl but i really liked your form. i see the giant rip on the shin too. it made me go ow just looking at it.

Ah, yeah, even with 45 sometimes I'm like "this is not what a real squat feels like". Because, especially with low bar, you're used to the weight pulling you back. Which means you bend forward more to balance it, in a way. I think that's why it's easier to get front squats/goblet squats *kitten* to grass -> the counter-balance in front allows you to sit back more.

And my form is not perfect there, either, so take it with a grain of salt. I was just showing that my knees don't travel that far forward xD My ankles still do that collapsing thing which I think is my arches loosing their, well, arch, on the way down. I need to remember to grip the floor with my toes!