The squat is one of the most common movements included in strength programs. Unfortunately, we see a lot of young athletes doing it with poor technique and a lot of coaches not understanding how to correct these errors.
Doing the squat with poor technique will not only limit it’s effectiveness as a strength building exercise, it can also become very dangerous. Many athletes injure themselves performing the squat with poor technique, so it is very important that coaches become proficient at teaching, recognizing errors and using understandable cues to correct these errors.
When coaching large groups or teams, I use some of the general coaching points in this video to teach athletes how to squat. The video demonstrates how to perform the barbell squat correctly and gives you coaching points to recognize and correct some of the most common errors seen this exercise.
I recommend always using safety catches on a squat rack, but for demonstration purposes, we did not use them in this video.
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Just out of interest, you can see in the video that before he decends into his squat he has an anterior pelvic tilt, would you reccomend that he tightens his glutes before he descends to correct this posture to bring it more toward a neutral spine and at the same time creates a solid brace via a valsalva maneuver?
Good Question. As far as how I coach the movement, I actually want the athlete to anteriorly tilt their pelvis. It’s actually the posterior tilt, or a more neutral position, that may allow the lumbar portion of the spine to go into a position of flexion. Which, is not what I want. That’s similar to the athlete being in a leg press and allowing their pelvis to flex and role out of the seat near the bottom of the movement.
With young athletes, poor flexibility and poor control over their pelvis has been the major reason why I’ve seen them squat poorly.
I’ve never seen a great squatter that isn’t good at controlling their pelvis. Some powerlifters who use am extremely wide stance may have a limited tilt. I’d have to look into that one. I’m just going off of a poor memory.
I hope that helps a bit, let me know