That’s the case with the traditional back squat. One of the most well-known and timeless exercises, and also one of the most controversial.

No matter how you view the back squat, squatting is an essential movement, regardless of whether you perform it with weight on your back.

Most of the disagreements focus on the safety of the movement. Some people believe that it’s too easy to get hurt doing squats. And, if you’re avoiding them, odds are you’re either worried about the same outcome or already have experienced some injury or pain while performing them.

If you’re not doing some variation of the squat, you’re training plan is most likely flawed.

We like to look at things a different way: if you can’t sit down (which is what squatting is) without hurting yourself, then the worst thing you can do is avoid the movement entirely.

Whether you want to squat with a weight on your back is up to you, but don’t let that stop you from cleaning up little mistakes that are causing pain or limiting your workouts.

If you want to move better, and see better results from your workouts, here are simple ways to ensure you don’t get hurt while doing one of the most fundamental human movements.

Why Do Squats Hurts?

Part of what makes squats great is also what connects them to injuries. Squats are a compound exercise, meaning that many muscles are involved in the movement. Everything from your quads, hamstrings, glutes, back, and even your abs light up when you squat.

While those muscles are all involved, you don’t necessarily want them doing the heavy lifting. And, that’s why a great movement for your lower body can easily turn into something like back pain.

If you want to move pain-free and keep tension on the muscles designed for the movement, you simply need to recognize where you feel “off.”

And, it’s important to recognize that the way you squat is dependent on your body. As we’ve broken down in detail, there’s not even one squat depth that’s universally correct—how low you should go depends on who you are. (Remember, personalization is a vital part of exercising.)

Instead, we’ll help you address any issues you feel when you squat, make it easy to identify why you struggle, and then make the necessary adjustments.

Whether you back squat, front squat, goblet squat, or perform single-leg variations, these tips and cues will ultimately make you better at squatting, identify weaknesses, and help prevent injury and pain.  

The Problem: Weak Grip

When I watch someone squat, the first place I look tends to surprise people. I like to watch the grip and upper back.

Why? Because most people barely take hold of the bar and activate the muscles that are designed to keep your body safe.

Most people, especially when they have a bar on their back, try to spend a lot of time finding a comfortable spot on their upper back. In doing so, they miss a key first step.

The Squat Fix: When you set up for a squat, you want to grip the bar as hard as possible and try to pull your elbows under the bar. If you just drop into a squat, you’ll feel unstable during the movement.

More tension in your hands and upper back create full-body tension. This tension will help you squat down with greater control and protect your spine and lower back. Not to mention, the activation of these muscles will also help you produce more force and lift more weight without getting injured.

The Problem: Leaning Forward

A popular squat cue is to keep your chest up and for a good reason. If you’re bending too much at your hips, it’s very hard to keep tension on the muscle in your lower body.

Falling forward transfers the weight away from your quads and shifts more to your glutes and hamstrings or potentially your lower back.

The Squat Fix: We could say this about every exercise, but start by dropping the weight and ensuring that your body can handle what you’re lifting. With squats especially, your body sends you lots of signals that scream, “This is too much!” Folding in half as you lower and sit down is one of those signs.

Then, work on keeping your elbows pulled down (facing the ground) and your chest up. This will ensure that the torso remains more upright throughout the lift.

You’ll also want to focus on your flexibility and mobility (more on this soon). Tight ankles, hips, and upper back will prevent you from hitting a good squat pattern. And, this will only get worse as the weight increases.

The issue could also be linked to weak core muscles (your abs) or weak quads. Instead of putting a bar on your back, strengthen your knee extension and stability with exercises like step-ups, Bulgarian split squats, and lunges.

The Problem: Poor Ankle Mobility

Ankle mobility is an issue for most because, well, most people don’t work on it. And, our reliance on stabile footwear makes your feet feel comfortable while compensating for the ability to build stronger, more durable, and more mobile ankles.

Losing mobility in your ankles means your shins don’t move forward naturally when you squat. If your shins aren’t moving forward, your movement pattern is altered and it can create unnecessary stress on your knees.

For years, fit pros have loved sharing pics of babies and toddlers squatting to prove how natural it is for humans to squat deep. Instead of focusing on the depth, look at the angle formed by their shins, which is enabled by better ankle mobility.

The Squat Fix: If you’re looking for more depth, a simple fix is placing a 5- or 10-pound plate under your heels and then squatting. The little change will help you sink into your heels when you sit down and achieve a deeper squat. By putting the plate under your heels, you compensate for a lack of ankle mobility.

If you want to fix the problem (which we recommend), try adding ankle mobility drills, which help restore normal ankle movement and improve squat form.

One popular drill requires you to face a wall in a staggered stance with your forward foot about 1-foot away from the wall. Then, try to drive your front knee forward towards the wall as far as you can.

Another simple exercise is to trace the “ABC’s” with your big toe on each foot. Try to “draw” each letter as a way to challenge your ankles with movement in each direction.

The Problem: Collapsing Knees

Next time you squat when holding a weight, have someone take a video or watch your knees in the mirror. How much are your knees (or one knee) caving inwards? A little bit of movement can be OK. But, if one knee looks like it wants to kiss the other (or both knees are making the move), it’s time to fix the issue and prevent a serious injury before it happens.

The Squat Fix: The caving knees (AKA “valgus collapse) could be a technique flaw, mobility issue, or weakness.

The wall squat is a simple way to test if this is an issue (without needing weight). Stand facing a wall with your feet about 6 inches away. Squat as far as you can. You will immediately see if your hips, ankles, and upper back have any mobility issues and you’ll notice how your knees track.

If this is a problem, shift to Goblet squats, making sure you go as deep as possible, while keeping your lats and core braced and forcing your knees out. This will provide dynamic mobilization of your hips.

Warning: this probably won’t be enough to fix the issue. Strengthening your glutes will help you keep your knees out during squats. Glute bridges and barbell hip thrusts will be your primary focus for your glutes, which are your primary hip abductors and will reduce the weakness causing the collapse.

The Problem: Incorrect Breathing

If you are not inhaling (deep breath in) as you move down into the squat and exhaling as you drive up and out of the hole, you’re not taking advantage of intra-abdominal pressure (IUP). This, along with the bracing of your torso, is your natural lifting belt.

The Squat Fix: Before each rep, take a big breath and brace your torso. Then, squat down, pause, and as you come up, exhale forcibly through pursed lips at the most challenging portion of the lift. This tension and bracing will help keep you safe and injury-free.

The Problem: Using a Belt on All Sets

Belts (much like lifting straps) are not a bad thing. But, you need to know how to use them appropriately. They should be there for assistance and not reliance. When squatting, there are a lot of lifters who wear a belt for all their sets. This much dependency on a belt will not help you develop a strong, functional core.

Squat Like a Pro: By putting off wearing a belt until the heavier sets, you’ll be increasing your overall full-body strength and potential for remaining injury-free. As a rule of thumb, you should work up to the point where you don’t put on a belt until you are around 70 percent of your one-rep max (1RM).

READ MORE: 

The Mystery of Squat Form: How Low Should You Go, Really?

Why Weight Machines Are Better Than You Think 

The Tension Weightlifting Technique: How to Make Every Exercise More Effective

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post Why Do Squats Hurt? (And How to Fix The Problems) appeared first on Born Fitness.

The question seems almost non-sensical, like asking if you know how to blink. But, the way you breathe while sitting at your desk is much different than how you should breathe while on a run, or when you squat with 300 pounds on your back. And, we’re not just talking about breathing heavier as you get tired.

Your breath is far more powerful than you think because breathing is so deeply tied to many essential structures of your body, including your spine and ribcage. It might seem impossible, but the way you breathe can do everything from preventing back pain to make you significantly stronger on squats, deadlifts, presses, and almost every exercise imaginable.

Before you complete another workout, it’s time to find out if you’ve been breathing the wrong way, and what you can do to make a small change that leads to incredible results.

The Power of Your Breath

Most fitness tips do not provide instant gratification. It takes a lot of reps and sets, sometimes across a span of years, to change your body.

And while no workout will instantly slash fat or make you more muscular, there are a few techniques that, like magic, can have an immediate impact on how well you train and feel. The Valsalva maneuver, which is a way of breathing, is one of those techniques.

Part of the reason it has such a dramatic impact is that for the majority of people, how to breathe when you exercise is completely overlooked.

When you learn about training, almost everything focuses on the usual suspects:

• How much weight you’ll use
• The reps and sets
• The exercise selection
• What equipment to use

All of these are important parts of training and exercise. But, all of these cover what you do. They tend to avoid how to do it.

While there’s no shortage of exercise explanations you can find online, it’s rare that tips on correct form provide a detailed explanation of how you should breathe.

But, the way you breathe on different exercises can make all the difference between staying pain-free and seeing more progress. Enter the Valsalva maneuver.

To understand how and why this technique is the key to no back pain and lots of strength gain, it’s time for a quick test.

The Soda Can Test: How to Know Your Spine is Safe

To understand why learning how to breathe properly is important, all you need to do is think about a soda can. When it’s pressurized and sealed, it’s very strong. You can stack several bricks on top of it and it won’t budge. But, if you open the can and let that pressure escape, the weight would crumple the can underneath.

Think about breathing in the same way: do it right and you’re unstoppable, do it wrong and you get crushed.

Correct breathing can make every exercise a safe and effective movement. Think about it: No one argues whether exercise is “good” for you, but plenty of people debate whether certain exercises should be avoided because of the risk of injury.

For example, you might know the squat as one of the best exercises for developing strength and building muscle. Or, you might think of it as an exercise that causes back pain. That alone means that plenty of you avoid squats (or avoid doing them with added weight) when, in reality, it’s not the exercise that’s the problem; it’s how you’ve been taught to do the movement.

“Everybody tells you to inhale on the way down, and exhale on the way up,” says Mark Rippetoe, owner of the Wichita Falls Athletic Club and author of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training. “That is complete and utter BS. If you do that, you will hurt yourself.”

Now, Rippetoe isn’t suggesting you shouldn’t breathe. What he’s saying is that the typical breathing cue is incomplete and leaves out many vital details. And that if you’re just breathing — and not practicing the Valsalva maneuver — then you’re at risk.

“When you Valsalva, you’re protecting your spine,” says Dr. Belisa Vranich, clinical psychologist and author of Breathe: The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program to Improve your Mental and Physical Health. “Most people don’t understand that you have to take a big breath in to be able to protect your spine [when you lift].”

When you inhale deeply, you create what’s called intra-abdominal pressure. The term describes forces within your abdominal cavity or the area surrounded by the muscles on the side of your abs (your obliques), your pelvic floor (on the bottom), diaphragm (on top), rectus abdominus (the area known as the six-pack), and several back muscles.

When you have a heavy load on your back, this pressure is your friend. It’s no different than the soda can.

WIthin your abdomen, the pressure you create with a deep inhalation helps keep your spine rigid and stable.

“Air is support to the back,” Rippetoe says. So the way you should lift when you squat is to inhale deeply and brace your torso, hold that breath (and bracing) on the way down, then either continue to hold it on the way up or exhale through pursed lips when you hit the most challenging part of the lift.

Before you try the Valsalva maneuver, there’s something you should know: in order for it to work for you, you first have to master an even more fundamental skill.

Are You Breathing Well? (Here’s How to Find Out)

Consider this Breathing 101. Because you know how to breathe, it will be quick. But, if you want the Valsalva maneuver to work, then you need to make sure you’re breathing correctly.

To understand how you breathe, it’s important to visualize your diaphragm as two separate parts.

Your diaphragm divides your insides into an upper (thoracic) cavity and a lower (abdominal) cavity. Think of it as the muscle that powers breathing. When you inhale, your diaphragm pushes downward against your abs, drawing air into your lungs and creating more space for them within your body.

“The lungs will fill like a vacuum once the diaphragm drops downwards,” explains Dr. Kathy Dooley, a chiropractor and anatomy instructor based in New York City.

However, a number of things, such as bad posture, can prevent your diaphragm from doing its job effectively.

“When your abs are gripping your diaphragm, it will not let you take a big inhale,” Vranich says. “If you go to take a big inhale, you’ll have to take it with your shoulders because your diaphragm is being squeezed.”

So what should it look like? If your belly moves outward when you breathe in, it’s a sign that your diaphragm is working correctly. It might make you feel self-conscious because it will look like you’re creating a gut, but you’ll feel and perform a lot better.

On the flipside, consider what happens when you don’t breathe correctly. The result looks something like:

This is known as “vertical breathing.” And it achieves the biologically necessary goal of getting you oxygen (because, ya know, you still need to breathe and your body won’t let that not happen). But, it creates a host of other problems.

The Risks of Poor Breathing

If you’re a vertical breathing, it can be a literal pain in the neck. That’s because this type of breathing tightens the muscles in your neck and shoulders. If you have your massage therapist on speed dial, vertical breathing may be why.

This style of breathing doesn’t deliver oxygen as well as a diaphragmatic breath, so you’ll have to inhale more frequently, which can elevate your blood pressure, pulse, and level of anxiety.

Even crazier? Your diaphragm attaches to your spleen, liver, and small intestine, and doing it wrong can cause a domino effect of health problems.

“If you’re breathing up with the chest, you may not be creating the ‘massage’ for your lower organs to encourage your smooth muscle (tissues in the gut) to act like it should,” Dooley says. “You’d be surprised by how much breathing affects your gastric emptying, and how much breathing affects things like IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).”

And then, of course, there’s how bad breathing affects your ability to use the Valsalva maneuver.

If you’re breathing “up,” using your chest, shoulders, and other muscles to pull air into your body, you can’t create the type of intra-abdominal pressure that will protect your spine when you lift—even if you took in the biggest breath you possibly could.

“If you’re building good intra-abdominal pressure, you don’t necessarily need to raise your chest upwards [when you inhale],” Dooley says, who adds that the reverse is also true: If you’re raising your chest upwards, you’re not building good intra-abdominal pressure.

Here’s a simple way to tell whether you’re using your diaphragm well. Look in the mirror and watch yourself breathe. If your chest and shoulders are moving up and down in a way that looks like the illustration above, you have some work to do.

How to Breathe Better (And Lift Weights Better Than Ever)

Here are 3 exercises that can help you breathe better and keep your shoulders down.

Breathing Exercise #1: Diaphragm Extensions
While Vranich teaches several techniques, perhaps the simplest method is an exercise that requires you to lie on your back and just breathe. (Yup, it’s really that simple.)

To perform the move, lie flat on your back and place any light object—it could be a book, a pillow or whatever you have handy—on top of your belly button. Rest your hands at your sides and cast your gaze slightly downward, so you can see the book somewhere in your field of vision.

Inhale deeply into your belly, raising the book as high as you can. When you exhale, watch the book lower. Keep breathing in this manner for a few minutes.

Vranich recommends you don’t worry about your pace of breath at first, just notice how breathing into your lower body feels. You may find that performing the technique slowly brings a sense of calm.

That’s because slow, controlled breathing initiates a “rest and digest” response from your body called the parasympathetic nervous system. For this reason, you may want to try breathing in this manner before bedtime, or even at the end of your workouts (when it can help bring your heart rate and signal to the rest of your body that it’s time to chill).

To start, try using it for a minute or so at the front of a training session to teach (or remind) you of how diaphragmatic breathing feels.

Breathing Exercise #2: The 90-90
As the name suggests, the “90-90” indicates that you’ll have a 90-degree bend in your hips, and a 90-degree bend in your knees. And you’ll need a Swiss ball.

Lie on the floor, place your heels atop the ball, and adjust your feet so that you have those right angles at your hip and knee. Dooley shows you how to set up for the exercise in this video:

The object is to inhale into your lower abdomen. Rather than just trying to press upward with the belly, think about filling the whole abdomen in every direction. When you inhale, your abs, your obliques, and the muscles in your lower back all should press outward.

“What we’re looking for is for the abdomen to fill in 360 [degrees] on the inhale,” Dooley says. “These muscles all around you are muscles of exhalation, therefore they need to expand when you inhale to build proper intra-abdominal pressure.”

Stay in the 90-90 until you feel like you’re getting the hang of breathing with all of those muscles, or for as long as your workout will allow. If you typically don’t have a whole lot of time to train, don’t worry about it. Even a minute will be helpful.

Breathing Exercise #3: The Dead Bug (AKA Dying Bug)
This exercise takes the good intra-abdominal pressure you’ve learned and applies it to moving your arms and legs.

To set up for the move, you’ll lie on your back with your hips and knees bent 90-degrees. (No Swiss ball for your heels this time.)

You can hold your arms straight overhead, or press them against your abdomen to feel the pressure you’re creating. Inhale, then exhale slowly as you lower the heel of your left leg to the floor, lift it back to your starting position, then lowering and raising the heel of your right leg.

You’ll do all of this (moving both legs down and back up) on a single exhale, maintaining stiffness in your core as you move. Once you’ve completed the movement with both legs, inhale and repeat. Perform 5 to 10 reps, where moving your left and right leg is one rep.

“This is a fantastic drill for learning how to build intra-abdominal pressure and build core stiffness but ambulate the limbs,” Dooley says. “It has a lot of carryover into things like squatting and deadlifting because you’re trying to maintain core stiffness and abdominal stability while you’re trying to ambulate the limbs.”

How to Valsalva Maneuver Like a Pro

If you know how to breathe deeply into your lower abdomen, then the first cue of the Valsalva is pretty simple.

“Big breath in,” Rippetoe says. “Before every rep, take a big breath.”

Just as you did when you performed the Supine 90-90, the breath should fill your lower abdomen in every direction. That’s half of the battle.

The other half is bracing properly. Here’s where the work you did in the Dying Bug comes into play. You want to engage your abs, your obliques, and the muscles in your back, holding them all stiff as you start your descent downward. Exhale when you reach the top. Then inhale and repeat.

As with anything, the little details matter. The Valsalva maneuver is not something you want to hold throughout a set. Exhale after every rep. Then, inhale and reset before your next rep.

One of the knocks on the Valsalva is that it elevates your blood pressure, which most of us tend to think is a bad thing. And it is, but only if your high blood pressure is chronic. In other words, if you walk around every day with a systolic/diastolic combo that’s well above 120 over 80, then you’ll want to consult with your doctor.

But, the blood pressure lift from the Valsalva is temporary—when you perform it, the pressure goes up. When you stop, it returns to baseline.

However, if you have a known risk factor like an intracranial lesion, then yes, you should speak with your doctor before trying the Valsalva maneuver. Same if you have hypertension that you haven’t addressed. As with anything, exercise common sense and communicate with your doctor if you have any concerns.

READ MORE: 

How Low Should You Squat, Really?

The Truth About the 7-Minute Workout

The Tension Weightlifting Technique: How to Make Every Exercise More Effective

The post Valsalva Maneuver: This Technique Will Fix Your Back Pain appeared first on Born Fitness.