Squat Mechanics

The Mechanics of the Squat

The squat uses nearly every muscle group in your body. While the glutes, hamstrings and quads are the major movers for the lift, your entire back, abdominals, and calves are critical stabilizers for the lift. Your forearms and shoulders wedge the bar into place.

Knowing how these muscular systems work together, and operate on your skeletal system can help optimize your lifting technique for maximum power.

There are a number of factors that determine how strong you are:

• Muscle Attachment Points: Every body is different, our bodies are constructed differently. Where and how your muscles attach are no exception. Where a muscle attaches to the bone, the limb it acts on to move affects the leverages you have for that movement. A difference of just a few millimeters can make a dramatic difference in your strength. That said, you cannot affect the attachment points, so we won’t get any deeper into the topic.
• Muscle Size: This may be intuitive, but generally speaking, the larger the cross sectional area of a muscle, the greater the force that muscle can produce. Muscle size is a function of hypertrophy and training, so again, we won’t address that in this lesson.
• Central Nervous System (CNS) Efficiency: As you train, your CNS grows more effective at engaging your muscular system to perform the lifting pattern. This, again, is a function of training.
• Mechanical Leverages: To some degree, you are able to affect the leverages you have in your lifts. In the squat, the bar position, stance, for example, impact your lift’s leverages as well as how the different muscle groups are engaged. This is the focus of this lesson.

We will investigate how to maximize the effectiveness of every muscle involved in squatting heavy weights. The first topic covers the biomechanics of the the squat, stepping through how your muscles act upon your limbs to create movement. The second topic addresses how your individual body mechanics affect your squat technique and how you can individualize your technique to maximize your power generation.