So you're losing the purpose of knee extension because it's not getting into bar movement and it's for sure putting your hip angle more closed. That would be the bar which means the bar is probably going to go forward.  That means the bar is going to go forward and you have this whole big hole to dig at us. You're listening to Barbell Logic brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Welcome to the Barbell Logic Podcast. I am Matt Reynolds and I'm here with Nikki Sims. Welcome. Welcome everybody. Hopefully it's a wonderful Monday morning for you. It has been an adventurous weekend for us. Do tell, Matt. So I was going through about this time, about the first week of the month, I go through the accounting for the business for the previous month. I get the general ledger from the accountants. That's usually how it works. And of course there's always, they know what most of the expenses are basically the same every month. And so there's always a handful of expenses like, you know, what's this and what category does it go into? And I was like, gosh, we have a tremendous number of Apple charges that came through on the business credit card. And I was like, I wonder what that is.  So I thought, maybe some of that software was purchased through the Apple stores. I mean, that's what I'm thinking at first like, what in the world is that? And it just says Apple and it's all these charges for like $9.99, $10, $29, $19, $4.99. It's all like that. Everything's not very expensive. I start looking like there's a lot of them. And so I'm like, something's, something's weird here. So maybe my identity's been stolen. So I get onto, I get into my Apple account and I look at it. And there are $1,500 in charges for a video game called Roblox that my 10 year old plays. Oh no. That is what I thought. And I was like, hold on. My 10 year old started playing in July Roblox on my iPad.  Now she didn't even have a real phone. She has one of our old iPhones that doesn't have cell service, but it has Wi-Fi and she plays games. Now Roblox is kind of like Minecraft. It's kind of a building block game. But I guess in order to get like the good stuff to build, you can buy it with real money. Shocking. Now, yes. And so she knew she was doing it, knew she was in the wrong. Said later, I was pretty sure I was going to get caught. I was like, in fact, you did. Oh my goodness. Not good. Yeah.  So first off, of course, I now have to pay back the business because I went on the business credit card. And then she has to pay back me. But how does a 10 year old pay back $1,500 to a dad? I'm like, what kind of chores can you do around the house to pay that off? They'd probably give her student loans. Maybe I should do that. Maybe I should get government guaranteed loans. Oh, man. Yeah.  I didn't lose my cool because it was just so ridiculous that I was like, what are we going to do? My wife is way not happy. I mean, you know Rachel pretty well. She is not a very emotional person. She does. I mean, she's very caring. And she's cool headed. Cool headed. Even as she speaks, it's really like reassuring. She wasn't angry, like lash out angry today. She was like sad. She didn't believe that our 10 year old kid would spend it. It was like, it was like 150 charges. Maybe 120 charges. But I know sometimes I got a reputation for Reynolds exaggeration. No, it's actually $1,500 that was spent in the last month. And I was like, babe, do you not understand that we, we account for every single penny that's spent at the business? And of course she doesn't know what's going on the business. Maybe she's like, I don't, I was like, you just didn't think we'd notice $1,500 was spent. And she, it was premeditated. That's first degree. So hopefully all you listen out there having a better parenting weekend than I am where my kids spent $1,500 on a video game. I was like, are they sending us, did you win with that $1,500? Did you win a car or anything? Do we have like cars coming or any sort of tangible things that we can use or maybe sell to pay off the debts? Yeah. Right. Maybe was this actually, is Roblox like a code word for like an IRA? Is that like you, you took out an individual retirement account or something? It's like for, you know. It's for sure a high yield savings. Right. Definitely. And the fact was, no, we got nothing out of the deal. So that's that. I was with my brother and his family most of last week and he was saying how they're trying to find like the right kids for their kids to spend time with they have four kids. Yeah. So this is 11 and they don't really, they don't, their kids don't have phones and they don't really want their kids to hang around other kids with phones. Yeah. There's just too much power. Oh, it's awful. If they can get online. How old are they? Those kids? So it's 11, nine, six, four. Oh yeah. Yes. I would not really, I would not push my opinion on the world about cell phones and kids. But I feel stronger and I have, I'll just be honest. I've completely screwed this one up as a parent. I think cell phones for kids is a terrible idea. Not just kids. I mean, my 15 year old has one and I don't think she can hack it. Right. So, and I get it. There's this time where you're like, man, your kids, if they go, you know, they're going somewhere and they're not with you.  And I agree. Like that stuff. But you're exactly right. They cannot, not only can kids not handle cell phones, adults can't handle cell phones. Oh yeah. So many times that I shouldn't even have a cell phone. Yeah. If it's after 9.30, I definitely shouldn't have a cell phone. Right. After 9.39, should not have. Nothing good happens. That's exactly right. Nothing good happens after 9.30. Yeah. So it's just, yeah, it's just, it's bad. There's too much pressure to do the things you're not supposed to do. And there's just too much access. You think about, you know, when we were kids, you didn't have unlimited access to anything when we were kids because we didn't have cell phones that had the entirety of the world's knowledge and, you know, high death. Yeah. Anything. And shopping. Like, I remember shopping from like a catalog and filling out an order form and mailing in the order form. That's right. And then just like checking the mailbox every single day waiting for that to come. But then it was like Christmas when it showed up. Oh, it was amazing. It was like the best day ever. Like, yes. I don't see the disadvantage to going back to that stuff. Now, let me be clear. I still want my Amazon stuff in two days. Oh, absolutely. I want, I want to talk about something. I want to see an ad on Instagram and I want to immediately be able to go and buy it on Amazon and to be there 45 minutes later. That's exactly right. Delivered by drone. But for my kids, Sears and Robot catalog it is. That's what we're doing. We're filling out catalogs. So. All right. So let's let's talk. So we're talking today. Let me set this up a little bit about the about the topic for the day. So we have talked extensively on the podcast in videos in articles. We talk about it all the time. We break down videos for our clients about the problem of knee sliding forward, right? That knee control in a squat. It is that idea of the knee sliding forward, you know, the weight shifting to the ball of your foot, the bar usually following and getting forward. Like that's just been, we've just beat that to death. Now, one of the things I rarely have heard talked about and it's a thing that I'm dealing with a lot with my clients right now is the opposite problem, which is especially as they come out of the bottom of the squat, their knees shove backwards. And we've talked about in a correct squat for the descent, the knees, the knees come forward and out in the first third or so of the descent on a squat. And if done correctly, they don't move from that point forward. They bend, but they stay in that spot in space all the way to the bottom of the squat. And for the first two thirds or so of the descent up out of the bottom of the squat, and then they kind of slide back into position. And what I've noticed with a lot of my clients lately and just watching even videos on Instagram and YouTube and whatnot is how many people, strong people come out of the bottom of the squat.   So have you seen that as well in your coaching? Yeah, totally. And this even came up on Slack not too long ago. Alex Beasley, one of our coaches brought it up and we had a pretty good discussion with a few of our coaching Academy instructors, like what might be causing them, what's going on. And the trouble is that you have all this movement from the knees and not an equal amount of movement in the bar. That's right. So you're losing the purpose of knee extension because it's not getting into bar movement. And it's likely or it's for sure putting your hip angle more closed without moving the bar, which means the bar is probably going to go forward.  So yeah, I've seen that too. And I think it's where do you think it comes from? Well, it's a good question. So let me say I think I think I know, but I don't know that I know. So I want to talk through it today. So let me you did a really job there of talking through like what we see. But for those of you that are listening or trying to visualize exactly what we're talking about, often the descent on these squats are perfect. They're textbook, perfect descent. The knees set in the first third of the descent, they stay put, drive down. They're completely on the middle of the foot. The back angle stays the same all through the descent, all the way down into the hole. And as they fire out of the hole, the knees shove backwards, they extend, they start to extend. But just like you said, they extend, but the bar doesn't go up. So they extend and their extension is making the hips go backwards. And as the hips go backwards, the back gets more bent over and gets more horizontal. So that certainly can then lead to the bar getting forward because the bar gets more horizontal. But it doesn't always, even if they're able to maintain the balance over the middle of their foot. But if you think about it, if you have a perfectly vertical shin, 100% of the body is behind the gravity vector of the bar path. And if it's 100% is behind, right now we talk about it. Like only your head and traps are there. That's it, literally only your head and traps. And I bet you see when the knees come back, I bet you see a whole lot of heads popping up. That's exactly right. Because all of a sudden you're trying to stop the bar from rolling up your back. That's exactly right. So that is what it looks like. That's not necessarily the problem. Really what that is is that that's the symptoms of the problem, right? This is kind of what it looks like. Everything shoots backwards. The knees extend, but the bar doesn't go up. The hips go backwards. The knees go backwards. The back gets more horizontal. And all of a sudden you got all this extra moment on your back that you're trying to overcome. And it looks like they're going to get folded in half. And then yes, they lift their chin way up to the sky. So either A, try to keep from getting any more forward or bending over in half. And also to try to keep the bar from rolling up onto their neck, right? So all of these are issues. This just sounds like such a fun squad. It is not a fun squad. And I mean, I have a lot of clients. So first off, for my clients who are listening to this right now and they'll be like, he's talking about me.  So we can use Andrew Jackson as Andrew Jackson is one of them for sure. But he's way not the only one. I mean, I've got six or seven of them. It also seems to only happen with my clients who have gotten generally strong already. It doesn't tend to happen very often during LP. And I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. So, okay. Do you have a theory on what this is? Well, part of my theory is that we, especially when we're first teaching someone how to squat, we are really enforcing the concept of leaning over because that's not a natural thing to do from the beginning.  And typically one of the first problems with a low bar squat is that they want to get more vertical whenever they get the chance to. So we're just like, no, chest down, drop with your hips. Chest down, drop with your hips like at nauseam. And then it's like they get too good at it the longer they lift. Yeah. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. So it's like we talk about overcorrections from rep to rep often, but this seems like like a chronic overcorrection. Yes, I would agree.  And we are most often talking about that actually during the descent. I actually do want my clients to visualize the butt or the hips moving backwards as they descend, right?  The idea of hip drive, and I think we've talked about this in the podcast, your hips aren't actually the thing that's driving your hips up, right? But hip drive should be straight up. The hip should go straight up. It shouldn't go back or forward or anything other than straight up, right? So let's talk about for that for a second. What makes the hips go up? Hip extension. No. And the extension. Only the extension, I would argue. Oh, because hip extension doesn't make them go forward. Okay. And the hip extension is going to open the hips, right? So we really don't want, if we talk about that back angle gets set in a squat, and the back angle really doesn't change in a squat. Like once you set it, it stays the same.  Not till the very end of the squat do you kind of stand up. When you stand up at the very end of the squat, that's when the hip extension occurs. There's really not much hip extension. What happens first is actually knee extension. The quads make the knees go straight. Well, what are the hips doing? They're an isometric contraction for the most part. They're anchoring everything so that it stays where it's supposed to, so that as the knees straighten, they drive the hips up. And as the hips drive up, if the torso is solid, you've got a good Valsaba, the bar comes with it. So if you really think about this, knee extension in the bottom of a squat, the knee extension, which is really just done by the quads, is the thing that causes the hip drive. And then following the hip drive, the bar should come with it. So the knees drive the hips. And as the hips come up, if everything is stable, we don't have an energy leak in the torso, then the bar comes with it. Well, what happens in the squat like we're talking about? The knees extend a lot. The knees go from very bent in the bottom of the squat.    You can make your butt go back. Just like in a bench press, we talk about you can extend your elbows, but if you keep throwing the bar over your eyeballs instead of straight up, you can actually make your elbows go straight and never make the bar move against gravity. The bar can just stay in one spot against gravity. So you can play that game. So I think what a lot of lifters are doing is they have gotten so used to hip drive and so used to trying to extend their knees out of the bottom that they hip drive their hips backwards because it's easier to drive your hips backwards because the bar doesn't move against gravity than it is to drive your hips up with your knees and make the bar go up. So there is knee extensions. We decided that the first thing that's happening in this error is that there is knee extension, but also to create hip drive, we need the extension. So the problem is that we're creating the extension, but the result of that movement is not being produced as we would like it to. Yes. So I don't think knee extension is a problem as long as it makes the hips and barbell go up. I think you do want knee extension out of the bottom. So think of it this way. You have to. Here's a better example. I think this will make it, maybe this will make the light come on for everybody. What should start a deadlift? A correct deadlift. Knee extension. Knee extension.  That's super common, right? So many times. That's like the most common thing. This is the exact same problem in the squat. Right. So knee extension should start the movement in both of those, but if they don't start the movement, they've screwed it up. There you go. So I have a couple of questions. Do you often see knees coming in when you see knees going back? That's a great question. And the answer is yes in females primarily. So if I watch your squats from the side or the rear oblique, I think I can call out, I'll call out clients who are also coaches.  Right. So, and I actually think that's a different weakness. So because I think the next thing that I want to talk about is, well, if we identify what's going on, what's the weak point? Right. So what do you think when those knees come in? Do you see that too? Right. You see them coming. Because I remember saying that to you when I first started seeing this a couple of years ago, I started seeing what your knees are doing on a heavy squat.  And then I was like, no, they're actually just rotating in. Right. They also sort of rotate back. Right. So you said something earlier that's I think coming around again is you need to have some isometric hip, like your hips are kind of isometric while your knees are supposed to be driving the movement upward. That's exactly right. But if your knees come in, it means that the muscle that keeps your femurs externally rotated is not doing its job, right? That's exactly right. And which muscles are those? Your glute medius. It's primarily those. It's your glute medius. It's all your abductors and external rotators. Right. So then you're also losing that isometric control of your hips. Absolutely. So it seems like they could be very much this. It almost seems like if one's going to happen, the other's going to happen. Yes. I would agree. So I think that when we see someone who has this problem but along with the problem, they have knee valgus. The knees come in. My theory is that the weak, the primary weakness is actually the outside of the butt, the outside of the hips, the abductors and external rotators that aren't able to hold the knees out in isometric contraction while the quads do their job to drive the hips. Yeah. So that it makes sense to me. That is the weakness. Now, the hard part is, is I, I still struggle to this day. With how to fix that in, you know, again, I definitely have some guys that do it for the most part. It's, it's a, it's more common with females. My female clients who struggle with valgus seem to always struggle with valgus, but as they get stronger, they struggle with valgus at a higher and higher weight. And that's how I know I made progress. Right. I think I've said that before. Knees used to come in at 155. Now the knees don't come in until you hit to 195. Well, that's progress, but they still come in. And I don't know if I, I've never been able to truly fix valgus where that is never the weak point. I'm just being honest as the catch just is. Yeah. Now the thing that I've struggled with is like for people who don't have the valgus problem. So for people like Andrew. So take an Andrew Jackson who's in, he's in great shape. He's muscular. He's advanced at advanced lifter. He's been an advanced Olympic lifter. So at first I'm thinking to myself, okay, if it's the same root cause kind of issue as people who have valgus, then it's not the external rotators and, and abductors that are weak. It's the hamstrings and the glutes that aren't anchoring the hips in place to allow the quads to drive the hips up. And that may be true. The problem is, is that his hamstrings and most of my clients that struggle with this that are, that are males and strong, their hamstrings are really strong and their glutes are really strong and they can deadlift F ton of weight. You know, Andrew can snatch 300 pounds over 300 pounds. He can, you know, he's, he's cleaning a ton of weight, like pushing 400 pounds. Like it's heavy. 600 pound. Yeah. 600 pound deadlift. That's right. He doesn't, he doesn't have weak hamstrings. Yeah. Nothing seems like it's what it is. And so it makes me start to think that maybe, maybe the weakness is actually the quads because he knows he has to extend the knee and the quads have to do that. But he's choosing to extend the knee in a place that's easier to extend the knee rather than harder to extend the knee. But the harder that stay in the knee would make the bar go up. And so they are extending the knee in a way that I can just keep driving my butt backwards and extend the knee all day long. But he ends up having to, and then this is the other thing, if he had weak hamstrings and weak glutes, once he drives his butt backwards and he gets way more bent over, his hips wouldn't be strong enough then to extend and open up. I mean, that's, that's the good morning squat that everybody talks about. Like he struggles with that. Good morning squat.  It doesn't seem like the hamstrings and the glutes are the problem. It seems to me like your quads are going to a place where it's too easy to extend and they're not actually doing their job, which is to initiate that knee extension and initiate the bar drive going up. So that's my theory on the weakness. So what we've been doing is we've been actually starting to work on more quad stuff because I wonder if you think about, just like you said, if we, if we take all this time, the first several years people train and we just hammer into them, hip drive, hip drive, bend over a whole bunch, bend over more than you should, make the hips drive and all that kind of stuff and they just, and they've, and they really set their motor patterns to do that. And then they get to this spot where like they're going to hip drive at all costs, even if the hips don't go up, even if they go backwards. And I wonder this is, maybe this is just dumb bro science, but do you think when people tend to start with us who aren't experienced lifters, do you think they generally have strong quads relative to like hamstrings and butt? Almost always. Almost everybody has strong quads, a strong, stronger anterior side than they have posterior side. If they have an athletic background, if they've, you know, if they've run, if they've jumped, if they've played volleyball, they're almost always much more stronger. They're very kind of quad dominant and we have to teach them to get out of their quads and in their hamstrings and in their ass and in their, like that's what you're doing. And then can you get to that point that that's why we don't see the problem as much when they're new is that like the capacity of their quadriceps is what it needs to be for the amount of weight that they're moving. But then there comes a point where like we don't train the quads enough or something slips where we've, we've maxed out the quads and we need to start like really honing in on that cue. Like I wonder if there's a time where we can like preemptively start queuing that sort of like, okay, I'm calling out that you are like pressing the beginning of your squat, keep doing that. Right, right. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. So I think, yeah, so we've kind of described, so we know what's going on. We know what the symptoms of the problem are. And I've given you my theory or our theories for what we think the actual weak point problems are. So now the question is what are the cues that we use and what are the fixes from a programming perspective. And so if we start with just the basic squat, let's say we don't, we don't introduce any other supplemental cues that we do often. But let's start with the squat in general. Some of the cues that I'll use are, so you can cue, if you think about queuing different parts of the body, right? So for example, I can actually start with the feet. One of the things I'll do is I'll say make sure you actually feel weight on your ball or your foot, which is crazy because I would never say that to a, you know, there's lots of times where I tell beginners like get all the weight on your heels, all the time, but I'll tell people like Andrew, I'll be like, let's make sure you can feel weight on the ball of your foot throughout. So I can cue the foot. I can cue the knees. I can say keep the knees forward. I can use a, I can use sort of a reverse tubo. I can take a tubo and instead of making them keep their knee on it just on the way down, they have to hold their knee on it on the way back up. My experience is that it doesn't work very well. A tubo doesn't work as well for a tubo. Keep the knees forward, hold the knees forward, things like that. You can cue the hips. I'm going from starting at the bottom working my way up. I just say hips drive straight up. Make the hips go straight up. Don't let them go back at all. That's where I'll say move the hips and the bar together. That's right. That's right. That has to come, like if I'm going to start, if I'm going to use the hip cue there, be like hips and the bar move together. That's right. That's right. So they don't leave the bar behind. Yep. You can use the back angle, right? Like just keep the back angle or try to get more vertical faster. Things like that. Again, some of those overcorrection cues, like get vertical. Because these people aren't going to lead with their chest. They're not going to chest drive. They're doing the exact opposite. So I'm going to try to get them to swing the pendulum back the other direction. So you might even tell them to chest drive. Those are all things you could say that work pretty well. Or lead with the chest or meat hook under the breastbone or the example that you give about driving the upper back into the barbell. If I think about, I'm trying to actually, I'm not going to think about hip drive. I'm going to think about back drive, shoulder drive. Yeah, thoracic. Drive the bar up in my back. All those are things that work decently well. But these things are actually, this is pretty hard to fix. And with the valgus, it's the same thing. They're tough to fix those. And we need them lifting heavy. Yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah. Because, well, if it's light, they can hold everything in position. Right. That's the thing with most my lifters. They get up to 82 to 84%. And it's perfect. And the knees don't move at all. And then they get over 85%. And boom, they come flying back. So, like, it has to be heavy enough to where it starts to expose that weakness. Yeah. To actually get it to work, you know? And so it's like, I'm going to have you do 15 sets of one tempo squats at 85%. That's right. That's right. And actually, tempo works pretty well. But you have to do tempo for the ascent as well as the descent. Most of the time when I do tempo, I actually just have them tempo the descent. But for this movement, if this is the problem, they also have to tempo the ascent.  The worst. Yeah. Actually, like three seconds down, one second pause, three seconds up. You're like, that's a seven second rep. I don't want to do that. You're never going as slowly as you think you are. No. It's always pretty fast. So then the other thing I'll do is I'll bring in supplemental lifts. Supplemental lifts that help try to. So again, what I don't want to do is I don't want to put them on a leg extension machine because I just don't think it worked. We're talking about a systemic full movement of the entire organism in a squat. And I think to take them out of that and put them on like a leg extension machine to like work their quads in isolation. I don't think works then when you take them back out isolation, you put them back on a squat. They continue to do the same thing, right? We have to figure out how to do what they're supposed to do. The knee extension do what it's supposed to do and really allow the hips and allow the hamstrings and glutes to do what they're supposed to do as well. All working together and not in isolation. And so I will start. I've been programming more often for supplemental lifts, things like a high bar squat or a front squat where the goal is to really keep a vertical back angle. Very vertical back angle. I have learned that a Q to Q, keep your hips under the barbell. Keep your hips under the bar is a really good Q because what they're doing is they're shooting their hips way behind the gravity vector. And so if they can really keep their hips under the bar, that seems that seems to be something they can connect with. Again, you can you can teach you can teach lead with the chest then certainly for something like a front squat leading with the chest is not even wrong. We just want to keep the hips from wherever the hips are when they hit the bottom in a descent is how far from the gravity vector I want to keep them on the way back up. So if they, you know, if they're six inches behind the gravity vector on the way down, that's fine. Let's keep them six inches behind the gravity vector on the way back up. But if they six inches behind on the way down and then they're 18 inches on the way back up behind the gravity vector, then you, you know, you've changed everything.   All those work pretty well and we just run through them one at a time until we find the thing that kind of hits the light bulb for the client. Yeah. I feel like that knee shooting back might also have a lot to do with someone not holding the full amount of contraction during the bounce too. Sure. So if, you know, you can tell the difference when you see a good bounce out of the bottom and when you feel a good bounce out of the bottom and it's like if you just let anything relax during that, you're totally going to invite you not being able to move the bar like you're really trying to for the bounce. So like if you can really tighten things up and like really brace for the impact of the bounce, a good bounce I think will have a high, a much higher chance of keeping the knees frozen where they're supposed to be. Yes. Instead of bouncing and then just like bouncing yourself out of position on the way up. So that's a great point that I should have thought about and made, but I've talked to Andrew about this as well. So when, well, you're going to bounce out of something off of something in the bottom of a squat. You're going to the bounces. Yeah. But even if you don't try to bounce, something is stretching is you're going to get the stretch reflex out of something, right? And typically you're going to get it either off the knee tendons or you're going to get off of the hamstrings, glutes and adductors. And typically you're going to get that all in an area down kind of by your sit bone by sit bones by your ischial tuberosity. That's where you should feel the tightness.  And on the very high inner thigh, almost groin area of the adductors. And so what I've noticed, so that this is what I think is going on, what you just described for a person like what we're describing. I'll use Andrew again. I think what he does, he does a really good job of staying super, super tight in his hamstrings until the last two inches of the descent relaxes his hamstrings, bounces off the knees. Now, what's he trying to do as soon as he bounces off the knees? He's trying to get his hamstrings tight again, because they just got loose. How do you get them tight?  So think about a deadlift. When you when you're doing a deadlift, especially like a, if you're trying to do the descent on a deadlift, you're trying to feel it. What do you do on a Romanian deadlift, Romanian deadlift?  Pretty straight and pushing your knees and hips back. That's right. You've got to push your butt back because you're trying to feel your hamstrings and you feel them up at that exact spot we're talking about.  It's, you know, it's it's pretty quick. And so I think the same thing is happening there. I think people let their posterior get loose.  And I think it's another thing that often causes that problem. Yeah. I've tried. I have this image in my head that I don't know if I'm doing a really good job at articulating it, but it's like, I imagine sitting into a squat where like you're like sitting into the rubber bands that are your hamstrings. Yes. And I want I want to create tension by pushing the knee side of the rubber band away and pushing the hip side of the rubber band away from each other. That's exactly right. And I think what happens during that bounce is it's like you end up sitting into this, you know, when you like loosen up a rubber band and it's just like this kind of slack. There's some of you a little bit of bounce, but it's just like there's there's so much slack, but it's like during the bounce, you need to keep those two, both of the sides moving away from each other, not just the hip side moving away from the knees. That's exactly right. And so it's like you bounce off of these really lovely taught hamstrings. If you hit that properly of pushing the knees away from the hips and pushing the hips away from the knees. That's right. If you don't do that, that's where you end up where you are where it's just like, oh, I'm only back from the hip side of the equation. Yep. Yeah. No, I think you explained that really, really well. I think that's a great, you know, it's it's hard to get tension in your hamstrings in a squat because because the hamstrings cross both the hip and the knee.  Hello. It's from all the yelling I did this morning. I'm just kidding. I didn't yell.  And as your hips bend, they're lengthening on that end. So essentially, they don't really get longer, but you can if you do it exactly right, you can actually make them get a little longer and stay taught. If you lose that taughtness, it's they're not they're not ever stretched like they are on the bottom of a straight leg deadlift or something where they're like a max stretch, but you certainly can get some stretch and the more stretch you get on them, the more powerful contraction you can make from the hamstrings. If you lose that and they just lose their taughtness, they're just they just loosen up a little bit. Then you've got to get that bounce or that that stretch reflex from something else. So you get it from the knees and then you're like, oops.  And but so now I'm going to shove backwards to try to get tight again. And then you're like, whoops, I just bent way over. Now I'm doing a good morning. What happened? And it's and it's a very quick. It's usually a very quick snowball of issues, right? Where they go, they kind of hit a weight and it's totally fine. And they go up 10 pounds or 15 pounds or whatever. And it sort of falls apart and they start doing it. And then you'll watch them on a set, especially if a set of three or set of five, each rep gets worse. So the first one is not bad. They've got good knee control. And the second one is like, ah, the third one is like, oh, that's that's it. So so that's the thing. So I think the fix is focus on in the regular squat, holding knees forward, keeping the knees in the same place, maintaining the back angle, driving the hips straight up. Right. All of those even feeling a little bit of weight on the ball of your foot again. All of those are pretty good for just the full foot. I'll sometimes use the full foot. Thank you. Yeah, the full foot. Anything else on the main squat? Driving the bar up with your hips. Yeah, no, I think we make the bar go. And then again, if needed, then you can start to introduce things like high bar squat, front squat, things that are going to force your quads to work where you have to then concentrate on keeping your hips underneath the barbell and actually driving the bar. So it connects the hips and the barbell a little better.  If you kick your hips backwards and the bar is in front of you, the bar is going to fall on the floor, right? Or it's going to be just really ugly and gross, right? So those are the things we do. Certainly you can slow the thing down. The things that I would do for my clients is I just have them slow down the descent and make sure they can feel what they're supposed to feel on the bottom. This often comes from an incorrect descent. And then they fix the descent and then they start to still have the problems of, well, now it may be a quad weakness and I'm trying to extend the knees without driving without making the bar go up. And so those are all some pretty good cues. So watch yourself in the side. Certainly would love to help you. By the way, cheap plug here. What do you think of the new sale we've got coming on? Oh, man. Like it's crazy, right? If you're just like, I really want to get coaching, but I don't have money right now. That's right. I'm not sure about it. That's right. Like if you're just not sure, then you're basically getting, you're getting a whole month free. A whole month free. A whole month free. And you're like, what's the catch? Do I have to put down? Do I have to pay a $20 deposit? No, you don't have to pay. You have to pay no deposit. That's it, right? So it's completely free.  If your shins get to vertical really, really quick, this is what we're talking about. This is the problem. And if it does that, you'll notice that your back is going to get more horizontal early and you can take what you learned here in this episode and you can apply it and start to fight to bring the pendulum back to the middle, which is really the goal. And then just as a coach, if you're coaching some newer lecturers who are moving in towards intermediate and such, just maybe like it's helpful as a more experienced coach when you know what to expect because you can start pointing out the things that they're doing correctly so that they have awareness of what those correct things are. So it's not just only correcting things that are bad. Just calling their attention to what they're doing properly so that if you ever need to cue it, they know what they're supposed to feel instead of having to teach them like, well, this is what that is. Yes, I agree.  And he's getting pretty strong again.  He's just completely doing it for health. And he's squatting three sets of five at like 355 now. So it's, you know, he's decently, decently strong again. His knees do not move on a squat. It is unbelievable.   Knees are in space exactly in the same spot the entire time. Once he breaks it, the hips and knees on his descent, he kind of sets it real quick and then boom, it never moves. It's been pretty wild to watch. Jealous, obviously. So it's always worse when it's like your brother and you're like, I don't do this as well as you do. Man, I like, I hopped on his true coach not too long ago.  Like you have like the same kind of amount of attention. It's just like the mannerisms were so similar. Even just in your lifting. Oh man, it's so funny. I love it. So it gets worse. He texted me yesterday. He's going to be pissed when he hears this.   He's like, we look so much alike. It's ridiculous. And I was like, which really surprised me that he shaved his head.  And he was like, yeah, it's just too, it's too thin. I couldn't do it anymore. His wife thought about it. I will speak for my wife that when I shaved my head for the first time, she walked into the living room and started crying instantly. And then I grew it out one more time around Christmas. She asked me to grow it out around Christmas. She started crying again. I had her shave it. So I, the day after Christmas, it was like, you know, literally December 26th and I was like, I can't. And I, by the time I grew it out the second time, I was way more bald than you didn't know and she had her cut it with the clippers and she ran the clippers right down the middle of my head. It was like, and she was like, she's standing over here. She's standing over, she's 15 feet away from me. So yeah, she's, so my guess is my brother's wife's not super happy about it either. But you know, at some point the hair goes, what are you going to do?  Do the comb over? Sorry for, sorry for your last card. That's true. That's true. Stacey, let's send Chris a, let's send him a card. All right. So that is, that is, Oh, that's true. And one of his wife too, that's probably good. That's true. All right. So hopefully this helps you if you are, if you're one of those people who've been listening to the podcast for years and reading all these articles, not just from us, from everybody. And we talk about all the needs going forward and like, my knees don't go forward, my knees go backwards. There is an episode for you and we're seeing more and more of that as time goes on and we teach our style of squat and people have been having a lot of correction problems where people work really, really hard at the hip drive and things like that and it's, you can take it too far. And so hopefully you've got some good, valuable information you can take with you and changing some of those cues and some of the lifts and so that's it. So thank you for listening. Again, we'd love to help you out till tonight only. So by the way, if you're listening to this on Tuesday, I mean, go try. They might, the coupon might still work. You can go to barbelllogic.com slash offers to find it, but, for more exclusive coaching, you just count code august20 and that's through Monday. What is the date tomorrow? Monday, August 11th, 10th, whatever that is, whatever the Monday is. Tuesday, I'm sorry, Tuesday is the 11th. Okay. Monday is the 10th. The 10th, you can get it and have your first month completely free for barbell logic online coaching. So we will see you in another week. I believe next week we've got our next series coming out on Technique. Big series. Again, I think 10 episodes all on Technique. Big lifts. Technique is important. Programming is secondary. All that fun stuff. So, stay tuned and we'll see you next week. Awesome.


I feel like I'm going to a different place right now. To pube or not to pube, that is the question. Do I need to wax my pubes? Asking for a friend. In case you missed it on your Instagram feed, there's been a revival of women and men reclaiming their body hair. But according to Cosmo's pubic hair survey, only 10% of men and 6% of women say they leave their bush as is, going fully bare down there, ranked highest in the survey, as 57% of women and 17% of men admitted to removing all of their pubic hair. The most popular reason for all this hair removal? Well, women said it was for hygiene, but is there really any science that backs this up? Scientifically, what is the point of pubes? So we get pubes during puberty, and it's a sign of adolescence. It's a signifier that we're going to be able to reproduce as well. You can choose if you want to remove your pubic hair entirely or groom it or keep it all as is, but we can't pretend that pubes are not normal. There is pressure for men to groom their pubes and to remove their pubes, but not in quite the same way that it can be for women. Pubic hair is not dirty, it's just another part of your body, and it's completely normal. Do you think that pubes can affect the physicality of sex? Yeah, I think they can. And again, it's totally down to personal preference. So I didn't have an orgasm until I was 21 years old with another person, and that coincidentally happened at the first time that I had any form of pubic hair. I just thought that it was a completely normal thing to not have pubes and to remove them all the time. It was only at that moment when I had pubic hair that I actually started to have sex that was really enjoyable for me and pleasurable. And I think part of that was psychological, of not being ashamed about that part of my body. And then another part of it was genuinely physical, that actually it was more pleasurable because there wasn't that friction going on between my body and someone else's. And could our preconceptions about pubes be hiding something a little more political? Pubes are technically political, but they shouldn't be. Body hair is completely natural, and I don't want people to think I'm like thinking I'm this super amazing feminist because I have long armpit hair. It's just what I prefer in my body. I don't think it should be a political statement. We are conditioned to hate our own body hair, and I do, I have battled with that. Like, I don't like having long pews. I don't like, I like waxing my pews because I like having a pretty hairless vagina. And I wish I didn't, but also I'm like, but it's what I want to do. I found when I was growing up my leg hair in summer a couple of years ago, people on the tube would just stare, like honestly, as if they'd seen like, as if I was carrying like a horse's head around with me. People would be like... You'd think porn might have a lot to do with the way we think about pubes too, but new red tube data shows more and more of us are searching Bush. So is shaming on the decline? Are fashions changing? Who better to ask than a beauty therapist who comes face to face with pubes on a daily basis? Okay, I'm going to apply the streus. Okay. Ow. You okay? Yeah, I'm great. Good. Ow. I'm so great. How many guys do this? Do you get lots of guys doing this? To be honest, we're really, really busy with male waxing.  Really? So like half and half now? Pretty much, yeah. That's quite a lot. I didn't imagine it would be that many. And with women, what's the most popular style right now? It's not usually Hollywood, so I'd be everything off. It's normally kind of like high bikinis, Brazilian, I think a lot of women like to leave quite a lot more now because they feel very childlike if they take it all off. And there's a trend on social media as well for Bush to be... It's coming back. Backing back. Yeah. It's coming back into fashion. Yeah. Do you think then it's like fashion thing? Yeah. It's more of a fashion trend. Each to their own, really. I don't judge anyone on the bed at all. Are we finished now? Yes. I'm just removing the oil. So there's not oil in your skin or anything like that. Okay, cool. So what have we learned? Well, babes, it's unapologetically up to you. There are so many fair and legit reasons why you might want to remove your pubes, but it's also worth remembering we're consciously and unconsciously pressured to remove our pubes every single day. From the people around us, our relationships in pop culture, porn and the beauty industry, the message is clear. The sexual ideal is to be bare. Something that is actually fairly unnatural because even raspberries have hairs, they kind of freak me out. I look like a raspberry, don't I, in a way?  And if that's with or without pubes, it's absolutely about what makes you feel happy and confident.