Crotch Squats

I've been loosely following Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength program since November and have gotten some decent results on it. Between November 1 and January 10, I gained 24 pounds and brought my squat up from 170lb for 3 sets of 5 to 250lb for 3 sets of 5. But when the weight started to get heavy, a number of old nagging injuries, combined with inconsistent recovery forced me to deload and re-evaluate my squat form.

And today after two months of experimentation, I finally figured out what the Starting Strength book describes, but never explicitly states as the key to good squat form.

You squat with your crotch.

You squat with your crotch because the squat is a hip movement, not a leg movement, and if you're going to drop your pelvis below your knees without giving yourself tendonitis in every joint below your shoulders, you need to squat with your crotch.

To get a feeling of what the key muscle involved is, do a classic adducator stretch before you start.

The muscles stretched are the ones you want to load on the way down in the squat. Rippetoe can tell you how to start the squat here. But the key cue for me is not to shove my fucking knees out, which is Rippetoe's constant refrain, but to make sure the adducator muscles take the load on the descent and initiate the bounce out of the bottom.

When the adducators take the stretch, it is impossible for your knees to slide forward or in, and it is likewise impossible for your lower back to round at the bottom. It's an odd feeling to load a muscle so rarely used by an office worker, but doing so allows for a surprisingly heavy weight to be moved with no form degradation. And moving weight with good form means the only thing to worry about on recovery days is sleeping and eating, rather than stretching or icing tender spots.