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Front Squat
The front squat is an effective exercise for strengthening the lower body muscles, targeting the quads, glutes, and the core. The exercise is done with a barbell in a racked position and requires the lifter to keep their torso upright, chest out and shoulders down. The hips and knees should bend in a smooth, controlled motion and the weight should be lowered as low as possible before pushing for an explosive return to the starting position. The front squat is an ideal exercise for improving leg
Transcript
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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, and today we're talking about another
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progression for our lower body exercise. So, we've done squat in previous video
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and all the modifications that come with a squat, including a ball wall squat
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and did dumbbell squats. Now we're going to talk about how to switch it up,
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progress in both load, as well as stability, in our dumbbell or kettlebell
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front squat. I'm going to have my friend Laura come out. She's going to help me
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demonstrate this exercise. So, the first thing we want to make sure of, is that Laura
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has good form. We don't want to overload a compensation pattern. So
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we're going to put her in her alignment, remember our kinetic chain checkpoints,
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her feet are going to be parallel between hip and shoulder width, we're going to
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have that first or second toe pointing forward ideally, and I'm going to have
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her, just to start, put her hands behind her head. We're going to check
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things out here. Let's see a squat. That looks pretty good. Laura's been
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fighting a little bit of lower leg dysfunction that we've been working on.
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But it looks pretty good. Let's see one more
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that way good. Let's have you turn sideways. As you might remember from
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your assessments with the squat, we want to make sure that she's not going into
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an anterior pelvic tilt; we don't have an excessive forward lean. Once again, those are
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two patterns that we don't want to overload. We see she has just a
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little bit of an excessive forward lean, like I said, we are still working
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with her lower leg dysfunction. Let me see one more. Laura's pretty strong,
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she's been working on her squats, she's been doing her dumbbell squats. She had
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been doing her ball wall squats, which we'll show again here in a second. I'm
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going to go ahead and progress her. Now, a lot of you have probably seen the
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dumbbell side squats, let's see those Laura. Just hold the dumbbells to the side, and squat
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down. The next logical progression, you might say, would be a
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back squat. Unfortunately I know a lot of you guys don't have a small enough squat
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rack to get a body bar in it, and unless Laura is going to only do squats with a
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body bar and her trainer to lift it on her back, I need to come up with
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something that's a little bit more convenient for her to increase load
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before I stick her into a squat rack with a 45-pound olympic bar. That would be
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a huge jump in load there. So what I'm going to have Laura do is start working
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on a front squat. So let me have you go ahead and pull these up this way.
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I'm going to have her turn to the side so I can show you what you are looking at.
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You can have them touch the dumbbell to the front of their shoulder, that's fine.
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The thing you want to watch for is that she's keeping her wrist
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straight, nice firm grip on the dumbbell, and keeping her elbow underneath the
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dumbbell so we had this nice triangle with the forearm almost perpendicular to the
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floor. She's going to have that on both sides. She should feel pretty strong and
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cradled in this position. She's going to draw-in, so she's not leaning back.
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I always try to get people thinking as if you were a football lineman.
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How would you hit somebody? You'd hit somebody with your fists tight, this nice
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little cradled position. I want that up here. So once we get her to this
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position, it just becomes our normal squat mechanics again. We're still
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looking for tibia-torso angle being the same, we're still looking for our
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kinetic chain checkpoints. So let's see that Laura.
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Nice and slow. Let's go down for two, a little hold at the bottom, and then
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squeeze your glutes and thrust your hips forward on the way back up. I have
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noticed more and more people as I start searching through YouTube, start talking
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to more and more professionals, this thrusting the hips forward to get the glute
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activated is actually a very common cue, and I think you will find it
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extremely effective for getting the glutes involved. Now, if I wanted to
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increase stability a little further, I could have her do a unilateral front
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squat. So I could take one of these away, have her put one hand on her hip, I'm
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going to have her go ahead and turn forward toward you, because now the most
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important kinetic chain checkpoint thing to watch for, is I don't want her
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leaning one way or another. I don't want her shifting at the hips one way or the
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other. Now she has to work really hard in her core to keep symmetrical. So let's
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see that. A little tough? Good. From here, of course, we could add for
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a stability progression, we could go ahead and add something like
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an Airex pad, or we can add dyna discs, or maybe even a balance board for some of
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our more advanced athletes. Now, a couple more things on this front squat:
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obviously a 10 pound dumbbell, some of you who are strength athletes, I know
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you can use much heavier weights. You might wonder why I'm not using
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a bar. Laura is not a power lifter. If you are practicing for your
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sport, that's fine. You need to work on that front squat mechanic, that's your
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sport, I understand that. From a performance enhancement standpoint, from
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a sports performance standpoint, from a recreational workout person who's just
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trying to meet their goals, it actually takes hypermobility of your wrist
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flexors to get into a barbell squat position. This is going to propagate a
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common postural dysfunction in the forearm that involves extensor
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dominance, and underactivity here. So unless you have a sports specific reason, stay
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away from the barbells. Stick with dumbbells. We've even worked a little bit
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here with a kettlebell, although this is less comfortable for Laura, but a
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kettlebell works out pretty well the way it cradles in here. I think you will
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find that these feel great. Now, I had mentioned that this is a progression I
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use going from a dumbbell squat to a front squat. Once again, going back to my
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strength athletes, this is going to be a progression from the back squat.
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If you're just talking about all-out stability, a back squat is probably more
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stable than our front squat mechanic. So if you have been doing your
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135-pound squats, and you want to take it up a notch and require more core
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stability from yourself, go ahead and try your front squats and then your unilateral
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front squats with either a dumbbell or a kettlebell. Once again you can do a ball wall squat. So if Laura was
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coming in, and let's say she hadn't seen me in a while, we hadn't done any work on
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her lower leg dysfunction, and she did have that excessive forward lean caused
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from her lower leg dysfunction, I could set her up on this ball to ensure that
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she didn't need quite as much dorsiflexion, and I can keep her tibia-torso
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angle even. I can still have her do this front squat mechanic.
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Hold the inside, it helps to hold the inside corner of those
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kettlebells and then you can actually bring your fists a little
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closer together. Let's go ahead and see that. And she's going to sit back as
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if the ball weren't there, it's just giving her a little assistance to then squeeze
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your glutes and thrust on the way up. So there you have it, we
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went from a normal dumbbell squat, to our front squat mechanic. Our front squat is
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a great way to progress in both load and stability, it's going to be less stable
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than a back squat, but probably an interim for most people because of the
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