Australian Strength Coach

Yesterday I shared my 10-step tutorial for the low bar squat, and now dinnyj🧿 is showing you how I teach the high bar squat.

Most of the cues remain the same. The biggest difference is the bar position and how that influences the rest of the body.

The higher the bar sits on your back, the more upright your torso needs to remain to keep the bar balanced over your base of support (midfoot). This generally increases the demand on the quadriceps compared to a low bar squat, where the greater forward torso lean increases the contribution from the hip extensors.

For the setup:
• Hands as close as shoulder mobility allows
• Elbows back to create rigidity through the upper back
• Shoulders down to engage the lats and brace the spine
• Choose a comfortable stance
• Screw the feet into the floor and keep the knees tracking in line with the toes

I want the body as stacked and aligned as possible. It won’t always be perfect, but that’s the position we’re aiming towards.

Here is the 10 point checklist that I follow for a low bar squat 💪

Remember, everyone comes in different shapes, sizes and levels of mobility, so the way these cues will present from lifter to lifter will be different, but the same principles will apply to most people ☝️

1. HANDS AS CLOSE AS SHOULDER MOBILITY ALLOWS

2. BAR SITS ON REAR DELTS

3. PULL ELBOWS BACK AND SHOULDERS DOWN

4. 3 STEP WALKOUT

5. COMFORTABLE STANCE JUST OUTSIDE OF HIP WIDTH, TOES POINTED SLIGHTLY OUTWARDS

6. LOOK STRAIGHT AHEAD

7. SCREW YOUR FEET INTO THE FLOOR (external rotation)

8. BRACE (Combine ribs down with breath hold and if you have a belt, push into it, 360 degrees)

9. INITIATE DOWN PHASE BY SPREADING THE FLOOR / OPEN HIPS

10. SQUAT AS DEEP AS YOUR MOBILITY ALLOWS (Maintain rigid spine and pelvis position)

The way that I teach the squat has been heavily influenced by some of the best squatters, coaches, and movement specialists in the world.

I use these cues successfully for myself as well as thousands of lifters world wide from the absolute beginner to the best in the world.

Of course there are many ways to skin a cat, but I know that if you give these cues a go, you’ll do well 💪

Here’s a handy illustration to teach you how to breath when you want to squat heavy.

I saw it many years ago from a Chinese Olympic weightlifting coach, and thought it deserved a spot on my page.

Of course there is more to a brace for a squat than simply holding your breath, however the breath hold is part of it.

You can never have a deadlift start position that’s too strong.

A lot of deadlifts are lost in the first few inches. People try to rip the bar off the floor, get pulled out of position, the hips rise early and the bar drifts away from the body. You then spend the rest of the lift trying to recover.

Paused deficit deadlifts are one of my favourite exercises for strengthening this exact position.

The deficit makes the start harder. The pause an inch off the floor forces you to maintain position where the deadlift is most difficult. Keep the lats engaged, keep the bar against the body and make sure the hips and shoulders rise together.

In this session you’ll see me work up to 260kg, identify my own technical breakdowns and make adjustments as the weight increases.

Strengthen the start and you strengthen the entire deadlift.

When it comes to bench press tempo, my recommendation is very similar whether your goal is strength or hypertrophy.

Position, precision and tension should always take priority over speed.

For hypertrophy, controlling the eccentric makes sense. You want the muscles actively controlling the load on the way down.

For strength, there can be a temptation to lower the bar faster to conserve energy or create a faster rebound. But if that causes you to lose tension or position, it’s not an advantage.

Look at the best bench pressers in the world. They’re controlled on the way down because they’re maintaining their body position, keeping the right muscles switched on and maintaining tension from start to finish. If you drop the bar too quickly, you have to release tension to do it, and that can compromise the position you’ve worked so hard to create.

On the way up, the objective for both strength and hypertrophy is to lift with explosive intent. This helps recruit high-threshold motor units associated with our biggest, strongest muscle fibres.

But explosive NEVER means sacrificing technique.

If trying to move faster takes your shoulders out of position or causes you to lose tension, you’re doing it wrong.

In this video, I’m explaining how to use your upper back to get the most out of your deadlift.

The deadlift is a whole body exercise. The role of the upper body is to maintain a rigid torso and hold everything in place so that the lower body can do its job and “push the world away”.

One of the main muscles responsible for this is the lats.

A big mistake a lot of people make is trying to “activate the upper back” by aggressively retracting the shoulder blades. Yes, that uses the mid-back muscles, but it’s using them in the wrong way for a deadlift.

Retracting the shoulder blades shortens the arms. That’s a great strategy for a bench press, but it makes the deadlift less efficient because we want the arms to stay long.

That’s why instead of thinking about squeezing the shoulder blades together, I cue reaching down and pulling the bar back into the body. This helps engage the lats while keeping the arms long and the torso rigid.

If the bar drifts away from your body, it’s usually a sign that the lats aren’t doing their job properly.

For beginners, I like using shin pads or knee sleeves over the shins as a teaching tool so they can learn to keep the bar close without scraping their legs up. Even though I’m not a beginner, I still use them myself. Over time, most people won’t need to drag the bar so aggressively against the body, but it’s a great tool for learning proper positioning and lat engagement.

Because when the lats aren’t doing their job, you lose one of the strongest muscles responsible for keeping the torso rigid under load and instead of looking like a crane, you end up looking like a fishing rod.

And that’s not what a strong deadlift look like.

S**T SANDWICH: A coaching technique where critique is sandwiched between two compliments. The compliments are the bread. The critique is the s**t.

CanCui | Online Transformation Coach called me out on it immediately 😂😂😂

I was coaching her squat, complimented what she was doing well, delivered the technical critique, then followed it with another compliment.

“Was that a s**t sandwich?”

Yes. Yes it was.

For the record, I meant the compliments. I promise.

Anyway, back to what the video was really about. The squat.

Can was squatting really well. Very upright torso, plenty of knee bend and excellent depth. If her goal was to build her quads, I wouldn’t change anything.

But Can is training for powerlifting. Her goal is to squat the heaviest weight possible.

So I asked her: what’s stronger, your knees or your hips?

Her hips.

Yet by staying extremely upright and pushing her knees forward, she was reducing the contribution from the strongest muscles in the movement.

So for Can, I actually used the opposite of some common squat cues. Instead of chest up, I cued her chest slightly down. Instead of looking straight ahead, I lowered her gaze slightly. This allowed her torso to incline more and brought her hips further into the movement.

You can see the difference immediately.

If the goal is to emphasise the quads, staying more upright and allowing more knee bend can be a great option.

If the goal is to squat the heaviest loads possible, we want to take advantage of the strongest structures available.

But this doesn’t mean everyone should lean forward or look down when they squat. These cues were specific to Can, her mobility, her proportions and her goal.

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How many sets should you be doing?

For strength, I’ve always preached that the stronger you get, the less volume you need.

As the loads get heavier, each set becomes more demanding and requires more recovery. You generally need fewer working sets and longer rest periods.

Traditionally, hypertrophy was viewed differently. More volume was considered one of the major drivers of muscle growth, and there’s still plenty of research supporting the relationship between training volume and hypertrophy.

But recently, the low-volume approach has become popular again, largely influenced by the training philosophies of Dorian Yates and Mike Mentzer: fewer working sets, taken extremely hard, often to failure.

And clearly, it can work.

But so can higher-volume training. Arnold, Lee Haney, Ronnie Coleman and Phil Heath are pretty good examples of that.

The answer isn’t low volume vs high volume.

My approach is to perform the most amount of quality work you can recover from while still progressing from week to week.

That doesn’t mean doing as much as physically possible every session.

It means managing volume, intensity and proximity to failure so you can recover, come back, and do more over time.

The right amount of volume is the amount you can recover from and continue to progress from.