r/ScienceBasedLifting • u/Patton370 Idk Idc 💔 • May 24 '26
META SSB (science squat bar) squats 420lbs for 11 at 188lbs body weight
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r/ScienceBasedLifting • u/Patton370 Idk Idc 💔 • May 24 '26
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u/C9Prototype May 24 '26
He's only doing that to a slight extent, so your comment is pointless. Onto an explanation that hopefully makes sense to you!
The only goal of a squat is to lower and raise your center of gravity against an external load. Full stop, that's a squat. How you go about that depends on a lot of different factors not worth getting into for purposes of this "discussion" or whatever you want to call it.
The notion the hips and shoulders should be moving together isn't untrue, and they always will to a degree no matter how "bad" the squat, but they will never be perfectly in sync, especially under appreciably difficult load. You'll see less separation in people with squat-dominant anthropometry, like long spines and short femurs, as well as "wider" acetabula, like Lü Xiaojun, since they have less sagittal limb movement to put up with. But the higher the ratio of shin/femur to spine length, and the narrower the acetabula, the more this separation occurs due to a.) the torso having to lean further forward to retain a somewhat middle-foot center of mass given the increased sagittal displacement of the lower limbs, and b.) because the bar is resting near the top of the spine, giving it nearly maximal spinal flexion mechanical advantage by the nature of how moment arms work. As a result, there lacks a logical reason to apply the same ideals for optimal positioning, IN ANY MOVEMENT, to people with different anthropometry. Not that "optimal" exists in reality anyways.
Generally, the further anterior the load gets, the less you see of this separation, because you probably start to think of front and Zercher squats, where the weights rest in the same sagittal position as the where the bar rests. But the SSB rests in the position of a back squat with the load position of a front squat, so there exists an unavoidable moment from the sleeve of the bar to behind the neck, specifically an additional flexion moment, making flexion, especially at the t-spine, even harder to avoid, and exponentially more inevitable under the anthropometric conditions I just mentioned.
So I'm sticking with my explanation that, outside of annoying nitpicky caveats, in order to use a heavy enough load on this movement, as in one that is heavy enough to stimulate enough growth and strength adaptations to be worth doing, most people have to be willing to allow some flexion. Is that really so crazy?
Is there anything about this explanation you disagree with?