Keeping Chest Up In The Low Bar Squat

Hip Drive, Keeping Chest Up, but not Leading with Your Chest

Keep Chest Up - Don’t Actively Lift Chest

Most people know that we don't want your hips to shoot up quickly out of the bottom of a low bar squat, while your chest and torso lag behind. This generally throws the bar forward of midfoot and creates a situation where you've extended your knees and hips, thus expending most of their potential to produce force, without the bar moving up the same amount, so you end up having to "Good Morning" the squat to finish the lift.

Image from Barbell Logic’s video on fixing the good morning squat

Not ideal.

But trying too hard avoiding this issue can cause problems too.

It's normal to feel like your chest is lagging during paused reps or very heavy/hard unpaused reps, even when doing them correctly. This can cause you to overcorrect for this feeling by leading with your chest out of the bottom or lifting your chest too early in the ascent, both of which kill your hip drive.

So it’s important to know that, provided you've become basically competent in the form and hip drive, it's almost always your body playing tricks on you, and you're actually fine. Ignore it and "stay in your hips." That's how we refer to this idea of continuing to drive your hips and not lifting your chest.

Tangent - Hip Drive

If you don’t know whether you’re actually hip driving or not, odds are you’re not - so you need to go back to basics and learn to do that first. I was starkly reminded how often this is the case when talking about hip drive the other day on twitter, and received this reply. If you think you should be actively engaging hip drive on the front squat, you fundamentally misunderstand what it is (there will be a little involuntary hip drive on the heaviest possible front squat, but on front squats, you’re TRYING to drive your chest up out of the bottom as much as possible to keep the back angle vertical, maintain midfoot balance, and prevent the bar from falling forward off your shoulders).

For those of you who need a reminder of what hip drive is, or to learn it in the first place, here’s a great video on that from Nick Delgadillo.

Back to Our Topic: Staying in Your Hips

A couple clarifications on staying in your hips while keeping chest up, but NOT lifting your chest:

1. Once you're about 2/3 of the way up, of course you need to start coming back to full standing, which includes making your torso more vertical. But that doesn't happen til you're closer to the top.

2. Generally we want the hips to move together with the chest and torso: the hips provide the motor and drive, but there should be no lag and the chest comes up right along for the ride.

Keep Chest Up: An Analogy

This would be similar to how a front wheel drive car operates: The front wheels may be the ones churning, but when the car moves, it moves as one piece: the back of the car doesn't lag behind, because it's all one steel solid body that moves as one piece. There's no lag between the front wheels churning and the trunk moving.

In contrast we might think of something like an accordion bus. IF an accordion bus had front wheel drive and a sufficiently squishy accordion, we can imagine a situation where the front of the bus was moving while the accordion stretches out, and only after the accordion was pulled taut, would the back of the bus come along for the ride.

That is NOT what we want on squats - we want our chest and torsos to come up as one solid piece like the front wheel drive car, not with the lag of the accordion bus.

And that's indeed how normal squat work sets should look, more or less.

But now for the weird part.

On most near max effort squats of substantial weight, there will be a small lag. And that's ok. You work your damndest so there's never a lag, and on your routine sets and reps there shouldn't be. But close to the absolute limit, there will be, so if you feel it or see it on video, don't panic. Just ignore it and do the same thing you always do, except, you know, with more force.

Stay in your hips. Don't lift your chest early out of panic and squelch your hip drive.