Squat form: the five faults that cost you reps

Lower Body Power days live or die on the squat, and almost every stalled squat is a technical problem wearing the costume of a strength problem. The bar stops moving, you assume you've hit your ceiling, and the actual cause is something happening in the first six inches of the descent.

Five faults account for the overwhelming majority of it. Each has a cause, a cue and a tell that distinguishes a technique fix from a mobility one. The form-video links on the dashboard show all five in slow motion.

Knee cave and heel lift

Knees travelling inward as you come out of the bottom is usually a hip problem, not a knee one — the muscles that hold the thigh in position fatigue before the quads do, so it appears on rep six and never on rep one. The cue is to screw your feet into the floor and push the knees out over the middle toes as you stand. Worth noting: some inward travel under a genuinely heavy attempt is common and isn't automatically a sign of damage, but if it's visible on warm-up sets, take load off.

Heels rising is either ankle range or bar position. Test it: squat facing a wall with your toes a fist away from it. If you can't get to depth without your heels lifting, that's ankle mobility, and the fix is ankle rocks in the warm-up plus a slightly wider stance and turned-out toes. If you can squat fine facing the wall but your heels lift under the bar, you're leaning forward — that's a bracing fault, covered below.

Butt wink and forward collapse

Butt wink is the pelvis tucking under at the very bottom of the squat. It happens when you run out of available hip range and the pelvis rotates to buy you the last inch. It is extremely common and not, by itself, an injury. It becomes a problem only when it's happening under heavy load, repeatedly, at a depth you don't need.

The fix is almost always to stop chasing depth you don't yet own. Find the point where your pelvis stays neutral, squat to there for the month, and work on hip range separately. Chasing a picture of somebody else's squat is how people acquire the back pain they were trying to avoid.

Forward collapse — chest dropping, bar drifting over the toes — is a bracing failure. You inhaled into the chest instead of the belly, or you lost the brace halfway up. Fix the breath before you fix anything else: breathe into the stomach and sides, tense as if bracing for a punch, hold it through the rep, and breathe again at the top.

“Depth you cannot control is not depth. It is a fall you happen to survive.”

Shallow depth, the fault nobody films

The other four faults are visible. This one hides, because a shallow squat looks clean. The problem is that stopping high cuts the range where the glutes and adductors do most of their work, and it lets you load a weight your legs can't actually squat, which is where the other faults come from.

Parallel — the hip crease level with the top of the knee — is the working standard for the program. Film one set from the side at hip height. Almost everyone is higher than they think.

The self-check, in order

Run this on your last warm-up set, every Lower Body Power day. It takes one set and it catches four of the five faults before they meet a working weight.

• Film from the side, phone on the floor propped against a plate. Front-on hides depth and shows knee travel; you need both angles across the month.
• Watch the first third of the descent only. If the chest drops early, it's a brace problem and the rest of the rep is downstream of it.
• Check the bar path. It should track over the middle of the foot the whole way. Drift toward the toes means the hips shot back or up faster than the chest.
• Compare the last rep to the first. Faults that only appear at the end are fatigue, which means the weight is right and the set was long enough.
• If a cue doesn't change anything after two sessions, treat it as a mobility restriction and train the range you have while you work on it.

When to stop coaching yourself

Pain is the line. Discomfort in a working muscle is training. Sharp pain, pain in a joint, pain that lingers the next day or pain that changes how you walk is not a cueing problem, and no amount of internet technique advice substitutes for someone examining you. See a clinician.

Everything else is patient work. Squat to a depth you control, brace properly, film one set a week, and let the weight rise slowly. Five faults, five cues, and about eighty percent of your squat problems are in that list.