Mechanical Squat Exercises

Video Transcript

"KIRK VICKERS: The next movement that we're going to do is called the mechanical squat. This is a squat mechanism and I think, many times, people jump in and start loading the squat movement prematurely because they don't even understand the position of the body. We call this mechanical squat because we're working on the mechanics of the movement. Chad here is going to help me demonstrate this. I'm going to put him into some positions and then I'm going to point out some angles that I think are extremely important. Chad, can you turn to the side first? First thing, feet should be just outside the hips and the pelvis. You can see his feet are opened up. We always want the feet pointing straight ahead. We don't want to go into what's called external rotation where we toe out and we externally rotate. That puts load in our spine; that pushes our hips forward. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to have Chad sit down. And the key here, if we can see, we do not want the knees over the toe. You can see that he's slightly behind his toes. He's got a nice straight-back position. He's sitting low into this position. This is a great position. His head is in a nice upright position. He's got a nice angle on his spine, nice position here coming through. We're going to have him stand up and then sit back down into the squat again, and trying to get as low as he can. He's going to feel weight and load shift back onto the heels. That feels a little bit awkward until you orient into a new neutral position. This is extremely important. He's got a nice angle here. What we don't want to see is that knee coming out over the toe loading forward. Right, show them again. That starts to put load, what we call a sheer force on the knee. We want to eliminate that and eliminate that. This is the power center of our body. We generate a lot a power through this glute muscle back in this area through here. We want to engage that area. Too many times, we quad load and we don't get back into this glute area. We're in the thigh area. We're going to try to load here first and then come out of that. Let's do a couple of those. Just do about three of those, Chad. One, nice position. This is going to work on a better center of gravity for him as well. That's great, Chad."