Trunk Strength
Here’s one of my more unusual career statistics: I’ve quarter squatted 700 pounds, back when I was in the 11th Grade. My high school coach was a veteran of Bob Hoffman’s York Barbell program for power rack training, so at some point between our conventional progressions for back squat or front squat he’d set aside a week or two for specialized ‘overload’ training.
At the onset of his teaching career, when he arrived in town newly married and fresh out of grad school, he had to get a summer job to generate some cash flow. He took a job at a trucking company, where the boss led him to the back of the property, to an ancient warehouse awaiting a cleaning.
Coach would soon discover stacks of flywheels from trucks and construction vehicles of all sizes. They were giant, heavy hunks of iron - but wheels, like barbell plates. It was a fortune’s worth of gym equipment for someone willing to be a little unconventional. Some of the wheels found their way to his house after work. If the boss knew, he didn’t care. They were all candidates for the scrap heap as far as he was concerned.
In our wonderfully rough and tumble high school weight room, down in the coal cellar deep in the foundation of the giant mansion in which our Prep school was founded, with its yellow painted four-foot thick stone walls, we had two sets of these flywheels that I can recall: two saw toothed 85-pounders, which were from full sized garbage or dump trucks, and two ferris wheel shaped, spoked 110 pounders that were from a crane. On a bar, they would account for an immediate 400 pounds. With our remaining plates, we could create loads in excess of 800. Coach considered quarter squats essential for the big guys who’d be throwing the shot and discus.
They did us all a great deal of good, certainly more than we realized at the time, if my recent experiences are any indication.
Influenced by the idea behind Westside Barbell’s training - not the conjugate max work but the assistance work on the lifts’ various components - I’ve made a point of deconstructing my major lifts. Starting with the bench press, I realized that pectoral muscles that are not trained through their several ranges of motion will have little to contribute to the lift. Thus the dumbbell rotation I’ve described in the past.
In the squat, another Westside analogy applied: a 28 year old squatting 700 quickly discovers his weaknesses under such extremes. The same is true for a 58 year old guy squatting 400.
Belt squats, with a lever arm attached to my rack, allow me to drop into a deep position and attack my legs without any strain in my lower back. The pain from a heavy bar on my back had to be sorted out, I was thinking. My legs could lift a ton. That span between the bar and my lower back was the weak link.
This was the moment my eyes fell upon the pair of old saw toothed 85-pound flywheels I had picked up on a visit to see Coach a few years ago.
Quarter squats are done by engaging a bar set at nipple height, or just below the pec muscles, driving it up from a dead stop, and lowering it to repeat the process minus any bounce or touch-and-go at the bottom. I started at about 500 pounds a few weeks ago for 3 sets of 3 once a week, and I’ve worked with 665 most recently.
The trick is in bracing like a champion, which interestingly does not mean going to extremes like taking ten gallon inhalations and straining madly. You do have to take a decent breath but not so much that you can’t focus on bracing your back muscles and setting your abdomen against your belt. Another trick is in not standing up quite all the way, which would allow your hips to sway in beneath you. You maintain the same position and muscular tension that got you up to begin with.
It took about three weeks for me to notice any difference while picking up my 300-pound-plus conventional squat weights. With improved bracing strength, the usual sets and reps no longer hurt. My progressions are headed back in the right direction.
I haven’t broken my deadlifts down into components in this fashion just yet - maybe because I already have long ago, doing Romanians and heavy shrugs in the rack. The deads themselves had needed the same reset that squats did about two months ago, but they too are on the move once more, so interesting questions arise:
Was the whole issue a case of bracing strength - for both of these lifts?
In the dead, I’m not doing Romanians or any other hamstring assistance work, mainly because I’m a little beaten up and sick of it. How far will the bracing work of quarter squats take me? Are conventional deads once a week enough to get the job done? Stay tuned.
