I want to do atg back squats, but I am currently unable to sit back all the way, as I simply fall backwards. I cannot even sit back into a full squat position when I am not holding any weight. Before, when my coach was watching me do back squats he told me that I should do front squats and romanian deadlifts instead because I couldn’t sit back correctly. I don’t believe that this is an issue of strength because my posterior chain is reasonably well developed and, most importantly, my mom (I know I am stronger than her) can sit back into a full squat easily.
What I want to know is what, other than strength, could be holding me back? Or is it a strength problem after all?
Tight muscles - could be any number of different tight ones holding you back.
You can try holding a 20kg weight disk in your hands to stop you falling back untill you rectify the problem, and still get right down without falling over. It will act as a counter weight for you and add resistance.
when at the very bottom with weight in hands, hold a few seconds and see where is feeling tight. A bit of PNF work and try again. A new area might come up or you might be fine… Or even some foam rolling on the tight area will help.
Could simply be a motor learning issue. I had a basketball recruit come into the gym a few weeks back from Washington state. He was showing me his back squat technique that his coach taught him, where he would lean forwards (almost like a ‘good morning’ exercise). When we had him back squat with proper posture (more upright), he fell backwards. He could front squat to parallel much better.
This fix for him was getting him to back squat to touch down and sit down on a box. We start with a short box and stacked bumper plates on it so that it was just under a quarter squat. He did 6 reps per set. Then we kept removing the bumper plates each set until he could go all the way to just below parallel, just touching down lightly (not settling). Then we removed the box and he kept his technique, without falling back.
I chalked it up to a motor learning issue. His body didn’t know how to decontract the antagonist muscles properly to execute a proper back squat. When we used the boxes, his body felt more confident and could relax appropriately. Once we had enough reps under his belt with proper posture using the box and plates, he could maintain the proper firing sequence to execute the movement. This athlete was about 6’6" tall as well.
You often hear coaches saying that athletes don’t have the flexibility in the ankles/calves, etc. I’ve never had a problem teaching an athlete to back squat when we broke it down with the support model (using boxes to touch down on).
I think the Lack of Calf / Ankle flexibility issue is due to the coach not getting the athlete to Sit Back like you said. A lot of people just do straight down, the squatter knee drifting way past their toes until their calf’s/ankles stop the downward drift.
There should never be too much strain on the calf’s that somebody is inhibitated from doing a squat due to tight calf’s. I have yet to come across anybody who’s calf’s cannot at least make it to their toes.
The Box method is very good for beginners or those who just plainly got taught the wrong technique.
Another way, is to squat just an inch or two off a pole, keeping the face infront of the pole, and not letting the face drift away backwards or going to the side of the pole. You can initially hold onto the pole for support until you learn to go down
I’ll try box squatting to get more depth on my squats. If the problem is mainly neural in nature, then hopefully it won’t take too long to fix. As far as ankle flexibility goes, I never really thought about it but I just tried to see how far out I could get my knees past my toes while keeping my heel flat on the ground and could only go out 1-2 inches when pushing down as hard as I could. Is this indicative of a need to work on flexibility or should I be fine just doing box squats?