Lydia, your squats look pretty good--the main problem I see in your squats is a knee slide, which is affecting your bar path. The bar path looks best in the last set. In the second set, you can see a sort of inverted J path. There are several things that could be affecting it, but the knee slide is the easiest and most important to fix first. TUBOW is your friend It will also help you hit proper depth, because it's hard to keep knees in place when you squat as deep as you do.

Shoving the knees hard out and trying to keep them in the same place during the bottom 2/3rds of the movement (both on the way down and up) helps me with this.

[EDIT: decyphering things for newer people reading this] A knee slide happens when the knees travel forward at the bottom of the squat, and this can be especially problematic if they move beyond the toes. The Terribly Useful Block of Wood prop is something you use to prevent yourself from doing this--put a block of wood that's about 2.5 feet long in front of your toes, touching the toes of one of the feet. Aim to touch the block with your knee but not tip it over. The contact should happen in the first half to 1/3rd of the movement, and the knees stay there until you rise back up 2/3rds of the way.

Ooh thank you! I know there is a foam thingy for the bar at the gym, might try your trick of standing that upright although the setup might be challenging! I don't think the good morning ing happened as much, maybe because being filmed you are that much more focused!

I thought it would be hard to work around TUBOW, too, but it turned out to be pretty straightforward. (And yes, mine is more of a TUBOF, since I use the foam cylinder thingy that's already at the gym. It works well.) What I do is set it in position where my feet will be when I squat, and after unracking, I walk back to it. Since I squat with my toes out, I don't even have to worry too much about knocking it over--it's slightly to the side of where my feet are when I unrack.

First time deadlifting with the big girl plates. My form got sloppy on the last rep as I was tired, so I bounced the bar up and down my legs. You can't see my feet, but they are shoulder-width apart, and about 2" from the bar. I know they should only be about 1" from the bar but I feel like my form gets set up better like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31SSvfNrV1k

Yay, congrats on moving to 135!

I can't see everything I would like to see, but here are some things I noticed. Your arms are comparatively short--I think we are the same height (5'9"), and my gorilla arms reach the middle of my femur, halfway down to the knees. Yours do not extend much below your hip crease. So for you it will be especially important to take a sufficiently narrow grip--your hands should be just outside your shins in the bottom position. I cannot see this feature of your lift in the video, but make sure to pay attention to that when you set up.

The biggest issue I see right now is back rounding. It isn't too bad, but it's there on some reps, so try to be more conscious of it.

From about rep 3 onward, the back angle is too horizontal. You have long legs, so you would use a more horizontal back position than I would, but I don't think it needs to be quite as horizontal as it is right now. Lift your chest up at the beginning of each rep--the cue is to point your chest at the wall in front of you. This is hard to do with a rounded back, too, but it will also make the angle slightly less horizontal. But overall, it's pretty good, at least to my eye.

Yes, I have short little T-Rex arms and long legs. Very disproportionate, LOL.

Thank you for the tips - I'll definitely focus on chest up. That's becoming a common theme for me to work on with each move, LOL. And regarding grip width, my hands touch the outside of my thighs when I'm upright. Is that right?

Thanks!

Shorter arms are an asset for pressing and pull-ups/chins, so I wouldn't knock 'em.

Sounds like the hand position is fine (see fig. 4-38 of Starting Strength)--as long as the arms are upright, you are using the most efficient arm position.

For attaining a less horizontal back angle with longer legs, it can help to point your toes and knees out more. That would be fig. 4-40 in SS and associated discussion.

I was also noticing that my head isn't in a straight line. Wasn't sure how critical that is for the DL?

I generally try to keep the neck neutral, and there is an argument for not extending the cervical spine since the traps are connected to the vertebrae and are under considerable load. As long as you are looking forward and slightly down, you should be okay. If you look at Fig. 4-30, you'll see that the more horizontal the back angle of the lifter, the more acute the neck angle to the rest of the spine. Although that could be an accident of the pics they chose. Anyway, your head/neck position didn't look extreme to me.

The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is turn my neck either during the ascent or at the top of the lift--that's asking for a neck injury. (It has nothing to do with your video--I just thought I'd mention it while we're on necks and deadlifts.)

Lydia, I do see a couple of things in your squats that could be addressed, but overall it looks good. )

As bumblebums was saying, your knees are very far forward. They're also too far in, which is why they're sliding forward.

Get down into your bottom-of-the-squat position, stick your elbows into the insides of your knees, and force them as far apart as you can. That is where they need to be in the bottom of the squat (or as close as possible, anyway). Spend a few minutes hanging out in this position to get the feel for where your knees need to go. This will protect your knees!! Under heavy load, with your knees so far forward, there is a lot of strain on the ligaments of the inside edges of your knees, and you definitely don't want that.


Try this while doing an air squat:

1) Position your toes pointing nearly straight forward. Don't let them point out more than about 10 degress.
2) Tighten your glutes as hard as you can.
3) Screw your feet into the ground -- this should feel like you're trying to force your toes to point out even though they stay pointing forward. You should feel torque from your feet all the way to your hips. The twist should make your feet arch a bit, too.
4) Hold your hands at about shoulder height with your thumbs a few inches apart, shoulders pulled back and down.
5) Think about your rib cage and its alignment with your pelvis. Most people at this point will have their rib cage tilted back slightly, and need to pull the front of the rib cage down so that it is aligned with the pelvis.
6) Lock everything into place by tightening your abs. At this point you should feel really solid from shoulders to hips, and you should still feel that twist from floor to hips.
7) All those muscles you feel in that twist? Twist them even harder as you use them, your glutes, and your hamstrings to pull yourself down into the squat. Do it slowly so you can control how far you go -- don't go down so far that you lose tightness in the hole. Take video from a 45 degree angle to the front so you can see what's happening with your knees. If you're maintaining that torque, your knees will go out instead of forward. Your shin angle should also be much more vertical. Best of all, when you get the hang of it, your squat will feel stronger and more solid.
8) All that tension you've built up twisting and pulling into the bottom of the squat? Unleash it to come back up, finishing with your glutes tight again (like the lockout of a deadlift). You may be surprised at how much power you feel coming up out of the hole if you didn't go too deep.


The "too deep" part is related to individual hip mobility. Past a certain point, the hips can't flex anymore and additional depth is achieved only by changing the angle of the lumbar spine... it rounds forward (the infamous "butt wink") to get the extra depth. You never want the amount of flexion or extension in any part of your spine to change during the lift! When that happens, your back is doing some of the work of the lift, which it shouldn't be. Its job is purely isometric -- all it should be doing is maintaining position. Bottom line is that if your spine changes flexion or extension under load, especially a load like a heavy squat or deadlift, it makes you susceptible to injury.

Practice doing air squats until the whole sequence of setting up like this doesn't seem like SO MUCH anymore. (Because for awhile, it totally does feel like oh, so very much! lol) Then get under the empty bar. You want to get all that tightness and torque in place BEFORE lifting the bar out. Once you're under load, it's much harder to establish tension. You need to be tight before lifting out the bar and then maintain it till the lift is done.

It's a lot of work, but when I reworked my squat form this way a few months ago after an injury, I was absolutely amazed at how much better my squat began to feel. Also, I strongly recommend Kelly Starrett's site and book (mobilitywod.com and Becoming a Supple Leopard, respectively) for learning more about this technique. One of my training partners, a competitive powerlifter, had stalled on his squat for over a year. His PR is 395 (IIRC he weighs about 155). He took a couple of months to rework his squat and is currently running a cycle of Smolov (very intense program he's run a couple of times during the stall) and based on his progress it looks like he's finally going to break 400 when he tests after the cycle. He'd been squatting with an arch in his back till he read in the Supple Leopard book about exactly how and why that was making his squat less efficient.

I hope this helps!

You can absolutely squat more!! It is NOT strength holding you back. That is very clear from your videos. )