Fixing the Squat
Holy crap am I inflexible. Not that I didn’t know this, but I just had an epiphany about how bad things are. This is both humbling and also kind of liberating. It means I’m probably a lot stronger than I’m currently able to demonstrate, and that once I get this whole situation a bit more limber I’ll be able to perform at a much higher level. I think part of my inflexibility has been camouflaged by the fact that I can still squat a fair amount notwithstanding my mobility issues. But I didn’t realize quite how bad my squat posture was until I bought myself a Rogue War bar and was doing some overhead squats in the mirror.
Now, I’m glad my gym isn’t the sort of place that has mirrors on the walls, but sometimes in a large class it’d be nice to be able to monitor my own form when the instructors are busy with other clients. As I’ve already talked about here before, I’ve got incredibly tight hamstrings and shoulders. You can add hips/adductors/whatevers to the list (or maybe it’ll be quicker to make a list of muscle groups that aren’t actually inhibiting my CrossFitting). I was watching this video from Jon Gilson’s amazing mic’d instructor series and realized that my torso is far from upright. I also recognized the awful canted forward overhead squat form from lots of other folks in my classes. That sort of weird, bent forward, bird-like stance that results when people grip the PVC too wide and also aren’t flexible enough to execute a proper squat. I’m thankfully not quite that bad, but I’m quite far away from being able to do a squat like the one EC does in the following video. I’m going to start doing morning and evening stretches for squats and shoulder stuff in the hopes that I’ll be able to see some pretty big jumps in load-bearing capability by the time summer comes around. For those of you that have issues with the overhead squat, or even just the normal squat (with my shitty posture I’m still able to front squat 245ish pounds, but I’m going to scale that back significantly until I can get my form dialed in), take a look at this video and see if you exhibit any of the signs of the “immature squat.”
