Barbell back squat

What it is

Set the bar in a rack at about upper-chest height. Get under it, place it across your upper back, take a grip wide enough to be comfortable, stand it out of the rack and take one or two steps back.

Squat: hips back and down, torso as upright as the bar position allows, heels flat. Stand back up. Return the bar to the rack deliberately.

Two bar positions, and they are different movements rather than right and wrong:

• High bar — across the upper trapezius. More upright torso, more knee bend, closer in feel to a front squat.
• Low bar — lower, across the rear deltoids. More forward lean and more hip contribution. Generally allows more weight.

The bar rests on muscle in both cases. It never sits on the bony bumps of the spine.

What it demands

Everything a bodyweight squat asks — ankle range, hip range — plus a large amount of spinal endurance, because the load sits above your centre of mass rather than in front of it.

Enough shoulder external rotation and extension to hold the bar comfortably. This is a genuine limiter for some people and is a reason to choose a front squat rather than a fault to fix.

A rack, and a plan for failing. This is the movement where the equipment requirement is real: without a rack you cannot get the bar into position, and without safety bars or the knowledge of how to drop it, a failed repetition is a problem you are underneath.

What usually goes wrong

Not knowing how to bail. Learn it before loading it — with safety bars set, or by dumping the bar backwards, practised light. This is the single most important thing on this page.

Depth changing as weight rises. The repetitions get shallower and the numbers get better.

Heels lifting — ankles again, and a raised heel helps here as everywhere.

The bar on the neck. Painful and avoidable; it goes on muscle.

Going straight to it. It is filed as advanced because of the setup and the failure mode, not because squatting is hard.

Where it sits

The most loadable two-legged squat, and the reason serious lower-body training tends to involve a barbell eventually.

The route is the goblet squat, then the dumbbell front squat, then here. The front squat keeps the load in front and stays more upright, which suits some people's hips and shoulders better.

Two things this site does not repeat: that the knees must not pass the toes, and that deep squatting wears the knee out. Both are addressed in the knee joint record.