Deep Squatting – Part 1
by Anders Hansson
translated by Ola Hansson
This is the first of three articles on deep squatting. We begin by discussing what is meant by a deep squat, in which fundamental ways it differs from the more shallow variants, and the practical implications of the differences. In the second part, we will analyze less obvious differences and see how these, too, affect the choice of exercise for a sprinter or a jumper. Finally, in the third part, we will scrutinize some common claims about the dangers of deep squats.
Personal background
My personal introduction to the barbell squat was to a shallow variant known as a “half squat”. I was in my late teens and despite fairly modest leg strength, the exercise allowed me to load the bar with a considerable amount of weight plates – enough, anyhow, to impress ignorant bystanders. Still, I wasn't comfortable with the exercise. There were several reasons, but the main one was probably the uncertainty in knowing when to halt the descent. If the achieved depth fell short of the intended depth by just a tiny bit, the lift was not hard at all. If, however, you happened to go a little too deep, you were in danger of getting more or less buried under the bar (this can be overcome with a good equipment rack, but we didn’t have one at the time). The consequence was that I rather played it safe and barely developed my strength at all.
Just about a year later I quit serious track training, but when I, a few years later still, took up training again to keep fit, I resumed with the same old half squat again. Pretty soon, my track club’s star thrower and powerlifter (more than 300 kg in contest squat) suggested that I should try to go deeper. Knowing that I would have to unload some weight plates, I agreed somewhat reluctantly. He got me down to what is known as parallel depth, but thought I might as well go even deeper. I then exclaimed something like: “is that really doable?” Now in hindsight, it strikes me as a little bit dim-witted, but then I recall the seam of my shorts actually bursting …
My leg strength immediately soared and I kept squatting to parallel for many years. I was reasonably happy with that though there was still an annoying need to estimate the depth. Sure, accidentally going too deep was less dangerous as you were in a lower position and had less weight on the bar, which you could therefore simply hurl backwards. But I was never certain whether a new personal best was due to improved strength or due to more generous assessment of the depth.
I soon discovered on my own that going deeper was not only doable but actually easily achieved. That I still didn’t change my routine was most probably due to my reluctance to reduce the load even further... Once I finally had swallowed my pride, there were no regrets, however. My leg strength increased almost immediately and rewarded me with new personal bests in various jumping drills. And the embarrassingly low load was of course entirely a good thing: there was now even less risk of an accident in the case of failure and I no longer needed a belt to support my back.
I had also been influenced by Internet forums and books. There seemed to be more or less agreement among experienced strength athletes and body builders that full-depth squatting was the prime leg exercise. No such consensus exists among track coaches (for reasons we will discuss in the second article), but full-depth squats still have a strong position as a general preparation exercise for lots of sprinters and jumpers – like, for example, Stefan Holm and Linus Thörnblad.
Squats in youth training
When we started training a group of mid-teen sprinters and jumpers a few years ago, we naturally put deep squats in a prominent position in their training program all year round. This we have never regretted. Far from it! The athletes’ improvements in their respective events have shown a striking correlation with their progress in the squat. Also, we have had very few injuries, and none that can be attributed to squatting.
But … Unfortunately in Swedish athletics there is a tradition of skepticism towards barbell training for youths – an attitude generally shared by the public at large, especially when it comes to the squat, which sometimes seems to be regarded as shady exploitation of natural talent, almost comparable to doping … Moreover, they reason, slow squats can hardly be beneficial for athletes in quick, explosive disciplines. On the contrary, they inevitably lead to premature athletic retirement with aching backs and shattered knees as company for life. To say nothing of deep squats … Common sense says that there must be something fundamentally wrong with an exercise that demands such an unnatural position – especially if you yourself are barely able to sit down on the sofa without collapsing.
The coach who utilizes deep squats when training teenagers therefore can expect comments from other coaches, the young athletes themselves, their parents, their school gym teacher, their physiotherapist, their doctor, etc. All of them have heard or read that squats are no good – neither for your health nor for your sports performance. Few have done squatting on their own and none, doctors and physiotherapists included, have the slightest idea of what they are talking about. And that’s the very reason for this article which now will begin in earnest.
Definition and execution
What counts as a deep squat? There are many different names for squat variations of different types and depths. Sticking to ordinary squats with the bar behind your neck, your feet not too wide apart, and a descent caused approximately equally by the bending of the hip joint and the bending of the knee joint, we can distinguish four different types of squat with names based on their depth.
The term “deep squat” is used for all squats where you at least reach the same depth as in the lower left image. In our training group we aim to go deeper than that: as deep as the hamstring muscles allow, when they can not be stretched further – as in the lower right image.
Almost all healthy people can learn to perform a deep squat. A person with a long thigh-bone (femur) relative to the rest of the body, however, has less freedom of movement and often need practice to find the groove, while a short legged person often gets it right in his or her first attempt.
Limited mobility of the ankle (sometimes blamed on “short Achilles tendons”) is often pointed out as a limiting factor, but that is actually very rare. In fact most people can learn to reach a deep position with almost vertically aligned lower legs (tibias) and therefore hardly need to mobilize the ankle at all. The difficulty is rather due to inexperience and an incorrect technique that can be quickly corrected. To better understand how the squat movement is restricted in purely geometrical terms, the interactive application below is very helpful.
For a successful deep squat it is crucial to keep the pressure on the rear part of the foot and you do that by sitting backwards as well as down. The upper body will lean forward, which requires muscular stabilization of the lower back to maintain its normal curvature throughout the entire movement. If lordosis is not maintained, i.e. if the lower back is rounded, the compression on the discs between the vertebrae will be uneven and this may cause injury when the load is very high.
When you reach the depth where the hamstrings can not be stretched further, and thus prevent further flexion of the hip joint, it is time to stop and ascend. At this point there is usually room for further flexion of the knee, but to maintain balance (and prevent falling over), this must be matched by flexion of the hip. As the hamstrings don’t allow this, the only alternative is to flex the lumbar region, but this will make you lose lordosis and should therefore be avoided.
There is of course much more to say about technique, common errors and dangers. We recommend Mark Rippetoe's book Starting Strength, whose 50-page chapter on squats, manages to deal with most of it, while also giving coaches good advice on how to best teach the exercise.
Note that the two-dimensional side perspective is a simplification that does not take account of the abduction and outward rotation of the femur (abduction gives wide distance between the feet, outward rotation gives a larger angle between the feet). In standard squats, these components are not so significant that we need to take them into account in our reasoning.
Since you lower yourself as far as possible, it is easy to be consistent in depth and execution. And since depth and execution very much affect the load (more on that below) you are in full control of the training parameters and obtain a fair picture of your physical status. When squatting shallowly, there is a tendency to get shallower as the weights increase, and thus deceive yourself that you are going heavier than you actually do. Have you really become stronger or have you merely changed the way you execute the lift?
We can therefore formulate one of benefits of deep squats compared with shallower squats like this:
- Maximum depth facilitates consistent performance and consequently provides more control over training load and performance.
The reason for the difference in load
We are all aware of the fact that a deeper position requires more of your muscles. It is harder to get up from a low sofa than from a high chair. But why, exactly, is this so? Why do you perceive a deep squat as much heavier than a shallow squat? It is true that you work a longer distance, and thus perform more work per repetition, but that is a factor that makes itself felt only after several repetitions. The reason for the deep squat being tougher from the start, must be due to the muscles having to operate more closely to their potential maximum.
One reason for this is that the force, i.e. the weight of the bar, is acting on hip and knee joints through a longer lever arm. This increases torque, and since muscles apply their force on rotating joints, it is torque and not the weight alone, that decides the magnitude of the load.
To help you understand how torque is affected by depth, execution, and body proportions, we offer yet another interactive application.
But whereas the lever arms of the external force increase with increasing depth, the lever arms of the muscles at the same time decrease. And since it is the lever arms of the muscles along with their force which decide the opposing torque of the muscles, you have to compensate shorter lever with more force as you go deeper inch by inch. This relationship holds true for both the lever arms of the hamstrings and gluteus acting on the hip joint, and for the lever arms of the quadriceps acting on the knee joint. We are talking about dramatic differences here – in a deep position, the lever arm can be as little as one fourth of what it is in a shallow position.
To help you understand how the lever arms of the muscles depend on joint flexion, the interactive application below is very useful.
The relationship between the lever arms of the weight and the lever arms of the muscles is the main explanation for the fact that a much lower weight is enough – perhaps less than half of what would be required for a shallower squat – and still it stresses the muscles just as much.
Implications of the difference in load
A lower weight on the bar means less stress on the rest of the body, since you can maintain stress on the muscles of the hip and the knee by simultaneously increasing the depth. Put reversely: if you choose to do shallow squats, you may need to load the bar with perhaps 100 additional kilos to maintain the same muscular stress. That means 100 surplus kilos of completely unnecessary stress on the bones and, crucially, the joints.
This is not unique to the squat: In all strength training you'd do well to minimize the external load by maximizing the lever arm of the weight, while minimizing the lever arm of the muscle. This is the preferred modus operandi in almost all barbell exercises. Your chest muscles can handle much heavier weights in bench press if you lower the bar only halfway to the chest. They are, however, not better exercised (on the contrary, worse) and you expose your elbow and shoulder joints to unnecessary stress. Moreover, the risk of accident – with severe consequences – is obvious!
- Deep squats exercise the muscles with the least possible stress on bones and joints.
Like the weight’s lever arm acting on the hip joint, the weight’s lever arm acting on the lower back vertebra depends on the forward bending of the back. It increases down to parallel and then decreases slightly. Unlike the leg muscles, however, the lever arm length of these back muscles is constant throughout the movement as they only do static work. Accordingly, the stress on the back muscles depends only on the weight of the bar and the angle of the back. While it’s true that you attain the maximum angle of the back in a parallel squat, the load is so much lighter than in a half squat that the stress on the back muscles is less all the same. At a lower depth than parallel the stress is even smaller as you don’t lean forward as much and the weight inevitably is lighter.
As a matter of fact, a full-depth squat is normally the only squat variant where the legs are stressed more than the back. To stimulate the leg muscles satisfactorily with shallow squats calls for a greater load than the back can handle without support from a firmly tightened belt. Even with far from maximum loads, the weights during shallow squats are large enough to cause enormous torque on the lower back vertebrae when staggering or swaying sideways just a little. To avoid accidents a supporting belt is therefore mandatory but not always sufficient.
With deep squats, however, the load on your back tends to be just right so that you can make do without a belt and as an additional benefit get a very effective workout for the lumbar extensors without losing emphasis on the leg muscles. Anxious complaints of back pain are to be expected from deep squatting neophytes as they recall all the horror stories they have heard about the exercise. But they are in fact only suffering common “delayed onset muscle soreness” in the muscles of the lower back.
- If the weight is too heavy to let you go deep, it is too heavy to have on your back!
We noted earlier that it can be difficult to achieve consistent depth when you are not going rock bottom. Since the load on the muscles is rapidly changing for every extra inch in depth, we now realize why you run such a large risk of getting into a position too deep for you to handle when doing shallow squats. To make it even worse, you are also in a relatively high position, and can therefore easily lose balance. Furthermore, you have a lot of weight on the bar and the height of fall is large. To avoid serious accidents, you therefore need two or more “spotters” or access to a power cage with horizontal bar catchers on each side. Because of this it is common, especially among girls, to stick with weights far below maximum load to avoid the risk of failure.This makes the training more or less meaningless.
Note: Of course you can find yourself in a spot where the load gets the better of you even in a deep squat. But you are then in a low, stable position and can simply let the significantly lighter weight roll down and drop behind your back. There are always risks with squats no matter how you do them, and for that reason you should stop the set as soon as you feel your power waning as you otherwise might begin to compensate lack of leg strength with a strong forward lean of the torso and/or inward rotation of the knees.
Finally a purely practical implication deserves mention. Deep squats require less weight plates which make it possible for more people to train simultaneously and reduce time spent loading and unloading plates. Rather important factors when training a team of young hobby athletes who have to manage both sprint, jumps and barbell training in one session and then hurry home to homework and meals.
- Deep squats facilitate smoother and less risky training, as fewer plates and less peripherals and help from spotters are required.
Athletic Design, 31 March 2009
