Hey, today we're gonna talk about squat grip. So there's a lot of confusion about how to grip the bar on a basic barbell squat. We want to talk about that today. So here's the key. In all of the other lifts that aren't the squat, the deadlift, the bench press, the press, the hands are holding on to the bar. Like, they're the prime thing that connects us to the bar. But on a squat, that's not the case. In a squat, the bar is really sitting on our back. And the hands are just there to keep the bar from rolling down the back. So we have to figure out how to put our hands in the right position for a right relationship with the barbell and the body. So the back there's the load of the barbell and the weight and not the hands, wrists and elbows. Because when we do this wrong, we end up squats often will cause tendonitis around the elbow and specifically the medial epicondyle. And we want to try to protect this as much as we can. When this becomes a problem, it's hard to get rid of. And a correct squat grip, most of the time, will allow us to avoid that issue. So one of the things that I want to do on a squat grip is I want to try to get my grip as close as I can because I want relatively vertical forearms. Now, the bigger you are, if you're like me, my grip is still pretty wide, skinnier people, narrow people might have there. I mean, really, we'll be able to put their hands right on top of their shoulders. But for everybody, it should be a very, very tight, it's going to be very tight at the pet belt tie-in. And in order to do that, we have a good friend starting strength coach Paul Horn is invented what we call the Paul Horn stretching. Check out that video. But I'm going to give you a quick taste of it right now. So as you're trying to open up your shoulders to prepare for the squat, you can do a stretch that looks like this. Patrick, you're going to take a grip with thumbs on top of the bar and we'll get there here in a second. And he's going to try to drive himself underneath and just stretch and then come back out and take a deep breath, come in a little bit and breathe out and come back out again and narrow your grip a little more and same thing. And you could just kind of rock back and forth and the stretch is going to be here on the front of the belt because our hands aren't holding the bar on the squat. I actually don't need to wrap my thumb around the bar on a squat like I would on all the other lifts. Instead, I want to use compression between the bones of the wrist and the bones of the forearm into the elbow to hold the bar in place, which means the bar needs to push on the bottom pad of my hand to create the compression necessary to hold the bar in place on my back. But the weight of the bar primarily is going to sit on your back, not in your hands. Conversely, if we wrap our thumbs around the bar and we get over extension of the wrist, we get it can lead to wrist problems, it can lead to tendonitis in the forearm or of the elbow, or if our grip is too wide and I have a big angle here, I end up with too much moment on the forearm and not enough compression. Therefore, it's not the compression that's holding the bar in place. I have to end up taking this wide grip and I'm going to have to hold the bar in place with shoulder extension which can also cause problems. In the end on a squat, if I'm going to shoulder extend, eventually I'm going to round my thoracic, I'm going to dump that bar forward, it's going to roll up my back. I want the bar to stay in place just below the spine of the scapula, so that's what we're going to do. So I want you to take a grip that's as close as you can comfortably take. The wider it is, there's too much moment, the more narrow we get, the more compression we get, the more vertical forearms we have. So take a grip as close as you can, stretch into it a little bit. We're going to put the bar just below the spine of the scapula here, so that's nice as below the top of the traps. Notice that he really, can you lift your elbows up at all a little bit? So leave your hands right where they are, come back out, narrow your grip one inch, and let's do it again. If he can give me some extra shoulder extension, then that grip probably isn't close enough. Now this is a lot tighter, you can see the nice big shelf of muscle on his back, just below the spine of the scapula, when you're ready, stand up with the bar, walk back, deep breath, and give me a couple reps. Good, keep that chin down, one more, nice and slow, and up fast. Good, walk it in, touch the uprights, and down. Good. So a common error that we'll see with lifters is, they'll actually swing the pendulum too far the other way, so most know that over extension is bad, but now we're starting to see people overflex their wrists, and that would look like this. That's going to go underneath. Now his hand is on top of the bar, which means that there can't be any compression of the forearm, therefore I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do here. Instead, he's going to get down here, bar in hand, neutral wrists, and now the bar is against the pad of the lower hand, and he can actually have some compression here across the forearm. So just as much as extension is bad, that flexion is bad as well. Now what's the problem with over extension? Well, over extension creates a problem because it causes torsion or twisting here in the forearm. The hand is loaded strange. The forearm twist, and we end up with problems often in the elbow, and usually in that medial epicondyle when we grip the bar this way. This is a very common grip for power lifters, or they'll often wrap their thumbs around the bar here. So same position just like this, and now I don't have a lot of compression here, rather it's the moment force of the over extension in the wrist that's holding the bar in place, and of course that can cause problems in the wrist, just as much as it can cause problems in the elbow. If all this fails, and you've got pain in your elbow from your squat grip, the primary thing we want to focus on is to make sure that the weight lies across the back and not in the hands. We want to feel the weight of the bar on our back and not in our hands, not at the base of the palm, not back in the fingers, and the more weight the hand bears, the better chance we have of having some sort of problems in the wrist, forearm, or elbow. So the key occasionally, my way that I just taught you, will also cause some elbow problems. It's rare, and that's why some people will wrap their thumbs or take a different grip in order to get all that weight on their back. If the back bears the load of the weight, and the hands don't, it's going to protect the hands, wrist, forearms, and elbows from future potential injury, which is often like a just a tenonitis, right? So that's what we're trying to avoid in the squat. When you get that tenonitis, it's hard to get rid of. So as soon as you start to feel that coming on, you've got to make sure you feel the load of the bar across your back and not in your hands. For more how-to tips on the squat, click the playlist right up there.