04.28.11
Front Squats: The Wrist Nightmare
An excellent addition to your workout that can really boost your squat strength and stability, the front squat is as painful as it is useful (incredibly).
What’s it for?
The front squat changes up the weight distribution in the motions of squatting. By bringing the weight in front of your body, you have to adjust in your movement to properly bring lift and squat the bar. This utilizes more stabilization, which in turn leads to a stronger and more stable squat.
Great for:
- quad strengthening
- flexibility improvement
- lower back stability
- wrist strengthening
When should you do it?
You can do front squats as a warmup to your regular squatting, or on a separate day. If you’re going to do it on a separate day, make sure to include the GHR and reverse hyper, as these will all work in conjunction.
Front squatting should precede the normal squatting – if done on the same day. This is because you stretch your muscles and tendons out more doing front squats. When your muscles are warmer and more stretched out, your squats will go much more smoothly. This, like most of lifting, is common sense.
The Basics
Place your hands on the bar, either shoulder width or slightly wider, and hold the bar either by your middle and pointer fingers or by your thumb. This will feel extremely awkward. When you lift the bar, you should have the majority of the weight on your shoulders (your deltoids, in particular). Keep your elbows as highly raised as you can, and perform the squat motion (try going below 90 degrees).
The video below shows a good demonstration of the front squat. The guy in the video uses all fingers to hold the bar (which is fine), but he doesn’t bend his knees outward when doing the motion (a big squatting no-no).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWnV6LqjvV0Balance is everything with this lift, so start off LIGHT.