Six tips for the Overhead Squat

BY KAT RICKER, MightyKat.net

The Overhead Squat (OHS) sits at the royal roundtable of the most efficient and
rewarding weightlifting exercises. It works the entire body, increases strength, power,
flexibility, coordination, and develops postural lean mass, which should be a priority for
any intelligent bipedal.

The OHS appears deceptively simple; yet learning it can be very challenging. Even
though it is designed, as all the Olympic-style weightlifting exercises are, to put the entire
body through its most ergonomically engineered paces, it is nevertheless an unnatural
movement. This article is both for the novice and the lifter already performing the lift
who seeks some nitty-gritty details on form and technique, to give the thinking lifter
some explanation and keys to executing this successfully.

1. Stick your butt out. It goes against everything you've striven for in general decency,
but it's going to go out - way out. Focus on moving your backside backwards, away from
your midline, and then focus on curling your lumbar up into extension, like a scorpion
raising its tail. What this does is set your center of gravity, so you don't end up tipping
forward or backward. Do it sideways in a mirror and try to keep your knees in line
with/in the same plane with your toes; don't allow them to move in front of them.

2. Press into the bar. This is one of the biggest things that can improve your
performance. One reason the OHS can be so counter intuitive is that the body wants to
move as a unit through the dynamics of physics - in this case gravity - which means that
as you descend, the muscle groups involved in keeping the bar raised tend to relax, hold,
and depress. So the scapular group try to switch from elevation to depression. The upper
traps try to switch from concentric contraction to bigger balance with eccentric, to brace
the body to catch the overhead falling weight. Use the cue to be constantly
lifting/pushing the weight, never just holding it.

Furthermore, there are far greater instances in work history that a person, if descending
with an overhead object, needs to buffet it away in order to keep it from crashing onto
oneself, than to catch it and return with it overhead with arms extended. So there is a
certain amount of instinctive response and primal muscle memory that must be
overcome.

To learn to press into the bar continually, focus on it through auxillary overhead work -
overhead presses, the Jerk Support and Recovery, etc. - whatever exercises you're doing
to assist in developing overhead strength. This means focusing on fully contracting every
muscle involved in keeping a load overhead, at every moment. Thought cue: be
constantly lifting/pushing the weight, never just holding it. This allows more muscles to
support the overhead position. It won't look like a shrug, but it will feel like you're trying
to perform one.
3. Keep your chest, neck and head up, while bending over. Building on the reasoning
above, it's easy to let the chest and head fall slightly forward on the way up. Actively
focus on keeping these up throughout the movement, especially when hitting bottom and
beginning ascent. Fix your eyes on something straight ahead or slightly higher. Be aware
of what your neck is doing. In order to keep everything tight, retract and elevate the
scapula.

Now, don't confuse this with trying to maintain a vertical posture. It's not like a ball squat,
where you try to keep your spine ramrod straight, like a chairback. If you do that, you'll
fall down. You will fold a bit on the descent, basically bending over, but at the hip joint.
So allow the angle of your torso to change, just don't round your back, droop your neck,
unlock your shoulders, or look down.

4. Bounce out of the hole. "When you master that bounce, you'll really take off in gains,"
Olympic silver medalist and coach Tom Hirtz told me. This applies in varying degrees to
all squats and the snatch. It means learning where to stop on the descent and begin the
ascent. Stop too soon, and you will perform only a partial squat, emphasizing upper
glutes and hamstrings, and a legitimate OHS will be impossible. Stop too far down, and
the squatting mechanism is completed, so major muscles will lose tension, and it's much
more difficult to initiate the ascent. The goal is to stop descending when tension is still
tight.

Focus on feeling it in your thighs, especially quadriceps, and think of your hip flexors as
springloaded. By shifting your focus from taking your cue from the glutes to the hip
flexors, you'll get a faster cue from your nervous system and be better able to detect the
"bounce" point. You'll also consciously engage your anterior muscles. This is important
because most people are trained to focus on engaging their posterior muscles in learning
the basic (back) squat, but the OHS is more of a front squat exercise than back, so by
focusing on the glutes instead of the hip flexors, your body is more likely to follow the
neuromuscular pathways you've set up for the back squat than to engage the
biomechanics necessary to maintain an overhead press while executing a squat. This
means that you're likely to naturally fall into the pattern of leaning forward, which is
what you do with a bar lying across your shoulders, and flex your elbows, which will lead
to you tipping forward and possibly dumping the bar.

5. Use your wrists and hands. It takes every muscle involved in the OHS to maintain the
proper trajectory of the bar for balance. The bar should be situated in line with a point
just behind the ears. As the body moves through the vertical plane, each joint must make
slight adjustments to maintain this fixed point. Be actively aware of what your wrists and
hands are doing, for they are primarily responsible for holding and positioning the bar, so
hold onto it! The fine-tuning points on this grip may mean adjusting throughout the
movement, so that the fingers extend slightly and the bar rolls out toward the fingertips as
the body becomes closer to the ground. This is the opposite of what would happen if you
were buffeting or catching an object overhead when you hit the bottom.

6. Push with your feet. Your feet are your foundation. Assume your starting position by
positioning your feet first. Your stance should be slightly wider than your shoulders, toes
angled out. Note that if you're tall, and your stance is too narrow, you're going to have
balance problems, so experiment until you find a secure width that you don't struggle in.
Be sure your shoes have firm soles and allow the footbed to fully extend. Throughout the
movement, be actively aware of the load on your feet, and when you transfer into the
bounce, push your feet "into the floor."