3 Of The Best Ways To Improve Your Squat

A long time ago in a gym far far away the Bench used to be the king of the lifts. When asked to inform a gym illiterate person of your physical prowess after informing them of your current excursions to the gym the following question always followed 'How much can you bench?'.

Now thankfully we've all moved to the true King of the Lifts, the Back squat!

Well okay, not really but among the gym culture the rise of lifters interest in the squat has grown enormously. Before the squat was confined to the likes of Olympic Weightlifters, Powerlifters and Bodybuilders, now we see 1000s of none competitive lifters appreciating the squat in all it's form for it's strength, muscle and power building properties.

Unfortunately the rise in use has not coincided proportionately with the rise in knowledge. Many users are often in the dark about how to improve consistently once the initial beginner gains fade away.

So how do we improve the squat and primarily the back squat?

1) Have a Plan!

So often we talk to people about their squat stagnation problems, they say they haven't hit a PB in months, even years some times. We begin the usual series of questions to figure out whats wrong, we ask what they've been doing etc. Usually what becomes clear is their program isn't, it's not well defined or worse yet people have a no plan at all!

What tends to happen is people either over simplify or over complicated the program and miss out any necessary changes in variation to progress or lack of consistency through over complication. The vast majority of the time people are squatting 1-3 times a week, which is great. You have to squat to get better at squatting, but where the problem usually comes in is people are doing the same thing week by week with little change in weight or reps. Very often it's the same 5x5 week by week, 5 sets of 5 reps week by week at the same weight.

Now 5x5 is a great little rep scheme in the middle of our training plan, for 2 weeks or so a challenging 5x5 is great for getting lots of juicy volume but while still using heavy weights. But it's just that, approx 2 weeks in the middle of our training block. If we do this for too long we end up adapting too much to the stimulus and not progress or we start getting fatigued from the volume.

So what do you do? How do you program to keep making gains while not getting fatigued?

We start at the end and work back. For example lets say your max is 200kg and you have no injuries and a clear run at training for the next 8 weeks so we aim for a reasonable 5kg increase of 205kg. So a high level program might look like this at the top sets.

Week 8 2x1 190kg, 1x1 197kg, 1x1 205kg

Week 7 2x2 190kg

Week 6 3x3 180kg

Week 5 6x4 170kg

Week 4 5x5 160kg

Week 3 5x5 150kg

Week 2 3x8 130kg

Week 1 4x10 120kg

Nothing crazy, no extra specialty bars, however at the same time we’re still adding variation in terms of reps, sets and intensity. Like so often is the case the answers lays somewhere in the middle. We’re not adding unnecessary squat variations but neither are sticking to 5x5 every day.

Write it DOWN! Writing in a notebook ads a sense of weight to our program.

Once you’ve completed you plan what then? We take a little break for 4-5 weeks or however long you feel is needed, a sort of maintenance phase of moderate sets and reps at a miniature version of the above. For example

Week 1 3x8 90kg

Week 2 4x5 100kg

Week 3 5x5 110kg

Week 4 4x5 120kg

At this point you should be ready to go again and guess what we’re going to do.

Week 8 1x1 210kg…..

You’re goal should be to do the least amount of work for the most amount of gains so if squatting once a week gets you to XXXkg and after a period of maybe 6 months you’ve stagnated and you have been working hard at the squat, giving it the respect it deserves but no increase is in sight then consider changing what was working to this point. The next logical step is to add an extra day and continue until this ceases to work. Moving beyond where you are now is often a case of repeating what’s gotten you this far (but maybe more of it)

2) Gain Some Weight!

This article is intended to give you some practical advice and not much works better for your absolute strength then gaining some weight.

Now before we try convince you further we’ll give you a real world example of what gaining some weight. In September of 2014 Eoin’s max was approx. 180kg at 85kg bodyweight, not a bad squat at all but really not where he needed or wanted to be. So Eoin implemented the first step of this article and made a plan with the help of his broken hipped but well endowed in the pectoral region friend Paidi (pronounced Paw-Dee). The plan looked surprisingly similar to the one above but along side this Eoin implemented step 2 and gained some weight. Long story short (and Eoin is) summer of 2015 his squat is went from approx. 185kg at 85kg to 240kg at 100kg bodyweight. Now we’re not recommending gaining 15kg of bodyweight but even 2-3kg over the course of 6 months will help immensely.

Very often squatters are worried about loosing sight of abs or are even just unaware of what the advantages of gaining weight can have on ones max strength. It may not even be about gaining weight in itself and the increase of squat favorable leverages but rather eating some extra calories can have a big effect on your energy day to day in the gym and over the course of several weeks many productive individual sessions will pay off, gathering momentum and carrying you to a new max!

Begin by determining your current daily intake and then proceeding to add no more than 15% of these calories daily when trying to gain weight. So if we’re currently eating 3,000 cals a day, a max of 450cals extra is needed and if you track your intake you’ll know this is easily obtained.

Buying the calories you need for the week is the surest way you'll eat enough and of the right foods!

The psychological benefits of eating more cannot be dismissed either through knowing you’re eating more and knowing you should be getting stronger or from physically seeing yourself grow in the mirror knowing you are stronger!

Of course the physical leverages of your body change as you grow, ranges of motions are adjusting favourable and more muscle will allow for more contractile tissue to produce more power while an increase in the cross sectional area of a muscle indicates a greater potential for strength.

Long story short EAT MORE!

3) Stop Worrying About Your Technique!

A strange one to write but I’ll explain myself promptly. Paralysis though analysis is something we often see. People ask us does my technique look okay, are my hips shooting up, why isn’t my back angle totally upright… more often than not it is totally fine! If you’re in a position of consistently trying figure out form and fearing going anywhere until it’s correct you’ll never push your limits.

Now we’re not saying let your form break down and risk injury, rather we’re saying more often than not, it’s fine. The simplest piece of advice is if your back angle is in a certain position before you start the squat is should stay that way throughout the lift until the end. If you focus on this, the rest of the lift should fall into place. Pick a style of squat that feels best for you and doesn’t cause any pain, then stick with this, get it as strong a possible and as you get stronger it will develop nicely along with your natural preferences.

If we change our foot position, our hand placement or even how we move throughout the lift too often it makes consistency more difficult than it needs to be and from step 1 having a plan and sticking to it consistently is paramount. For example if on week 1 we change something no big deal right, then on week 3 we change something again. Still no big deal, the weights are light but by week 6 if we still haven’t nailed down the squat form that’s best for us and made our movement automatic then thinking out way through a new 3x3 PB is going to be a lot harder than if we’re a well oiled machine. Bruce Lee famously said ‘I fear not the man who’s practiced 10,000 kicks once but I fear the man who’s practiced one kick 10,000 times’.

We’d implore you to practice that one squat 10,000 times and strengthen your form to it’s best possible evolution. When you get to big weights, you’ll know exactly what to do without thinking and you’ll be giving yourself the most optimal conditions to win and progress to new levels!

4) Bonus step. Stop getting injured!

Finally something I wanted to add but it’s pretty ambiguous and hard to give a general recommendation to everyone but we feel it’s important to add. The last big barrier to many people improving their squat is infuriatingly they’re often out of the game for months. When we’re injured we can’t follow steps 1 and 3 while step 2 is useless! Too often we have tendinitis, back injuries, knee pain and any other number of ailments. The most upsetting part of this for us is that often this injuries are preventable with some proper planning and patience with a heavy dose of boring but powerfully effective assistance exercises.

Yeah we know crab walks aren’t very fun, no one likes eccentric pistols and quad Nordics hurt in a way that’s not in anyway fun but we also know that these could be the difference between you squatting for years without falter or you stumbling along for frustrating month without being able to squat let alone squat heavy.

In future we’ll write about the best exercises to help the squat that isn’t just more squatting but for now we want you to think about what are you not doing right now that could be not only helping certain areas get stronger but more importantly preventing you from getting injuries from minor movement infractions or unilateral discrepancies