

Written by Chad Wesley Smith

Is your squat stagnant? Have you plateaued? Chances just some small adjustments to your training can help you break through your stagnation and hit some new PRs. Check out these 5 tips and get that squat moving again.

1. You Aren’t Jumping

Great squatting requires great explosive power and nothing does that better than jumping. Box jumps, squat jumps and depth jumps are all great means to improve explosive power that will carryover to your squat. When you do box jumps, make sure you land in a parallel squat or above, don’t let them turn into an exercise in how well you can pull your knees up to your ears. Squat jumps, either holding weights or with a bar on your back, are a great and specific tool to improve the squat. These can be done from different depths (quarter squat, half squat, full squat) and introducing a pause to them will also yield a great benefit. Depth jumps have tremendous strength benefits but are also very taxing to the joints and CNS, so they must be used strategically. The stronger you are relative to your bodyweight, the higher box you can drop from as you will be able to better overcome the inertia of the landing. Be a strength athlete, get jumping and reap the squat rewards.

Go more in depth with your jump training in this article.

2. You Move Like Sh*t

If your hips, ankles, quads or calves are immobile/unstable, your squat is suffering. Movement deficiencies anywhere in the body can have a negative effect on your squatting technique and leave you injured or unable to train as hard as possible. Mobility or dare I say, suppleness, in the legs and hips will allow you to hit depth easier, stay in better and more powerful positions and most of all, squat more. The interrelated nature of movement and the kinetic chain is plenty of info for its own article-or book-and would be better covered by someone besides me, but for me I know that my problematic mobility areas are tightness in the quads which causes too much forward knee travel and tightness in the calves which limits ankle mobility making it harder to hit depth and causing knee pain. Both of these are solved for me through soft tissue work, a little stretching and just more frequent squatting. Improving movement quality doesn’t have to mean you are doing a full corrective program and never training hard but it is extremely important to your success.

Check out these great articles from Dr. Quinn Henoch to improve the bottom position of your squat and fix common errors in mobility training.

3. You Don’t Know How To Breathe

Say what?! Of course, I know how to breathe, I’m alive aren’t I? Well you don’t know how to breathe for maximum performance. Knowing how to properly breathe and brace your spine will make a tremendous to your squatting strength. For years you have been told to push your abs out into the belt or get ‘big air in your belly’, I’m guilty of cueing that myself, but it is only half of the equation. We want to create circumferential expansion of your trunk, creating 360 degrees of pressure through your low back, obliques and abs maximize tension and support in the squat. Think of breathing into your low back while flexing your glutes to create a neutral hip position to begin improving this position. Bracing a neutral spine position is stronger and healthier for maximum performance in the squat.

Ryan Brown goes in depth to how breathing can benefit your performance in the squat and other lifts…