Cable squats : exercise tips

Cable squats : Exercise tips -

A Beginner guide to cable squats -

What's up guys,

Today I want to show you one thing to do before every time you squat that I promise is going to help you. 

What are Cable Squats?

Cable squats are low intensity, full-body exercises that can be performed while sitting or standing. They are extremely convenient and versatile, since they can be used as warm-up, lower/mid-range cardio, full-body conditioning, and full-body strength training exercises.

A brief history of cable squats The exact origin of the “cable squat” is not known, though it is known to have been in use at least as early as 1858. By the early twentieth century, commercial model circus trainers, such as George Anthony and Harry Nelson Smith, were using the exercise as part of their exercise routine, and soon popularized the exercise. Cable Squats are often thought of as a type of squat, even though they are different in many ways.

How to Perform Cable Squats ?

The main thing to remember when you perform your cable squats is to get good breathing technique and to keep your head up. That makes you look strong and confident. This type of exercise is great for people with weak knees, as well as for someone with balance issues. It's also great for those with weak glutes and abdominals. How to set up your squat rack Before you begin, remove any equipment that may get in the way. Make sure that the seat isn't in contact with anything.

I wouldn't recommend using the same rack that you normally use for back squats. Here's why. When you set up your overhead press you only need your back and arms to be stable. Since the weight only comes halfway up your body, you can concentrate on the movement of your arms and not so much on your lower back.

Cable Squats Alternative

This is a follow up post of “How to perform cable squat in conventional gym“. If you’ve read that post then you’ll know the main reason I decided to make this post: a lot of people asked me about alternatives to the traditional cable squat. Cable Squats isn’t the best exercise for your legs and glutes. Your average strength lifters (mainly bodybuilders) would advise you to do “squats only”, especially for myofibrillar building. While there are numerous reasons not to do that, and I’ll be addressing some of them later on, I will give you one alternative.

The Rowing Program Your standard rower is a great machine for training your arms. The body is stable, you can progress a lot and the effort is comparatively low, especially when compared to a power-lift.

If you have knee problems, this is going tobe an absolute Godsend. Trust me. As someone that has knee problems myself,it’s going to change the way you feel the next time you step under a bar. Second, if you’re someone who feels like you can squat more, that you should be able to squat more than you are, I promise this is going to help as well. 

But it starts with defining what the squat is. Biomechanically, to me, it’s a marriage,a synchronization between the amount of knee flexion you get and the amount of hip flexion we get. 

Cable Squats tips :

We know that hip flexion is critical – the hinge is critical – for posterior loading. So, we need to have both components because this movement is, and always will be, driven by the glutes. This is a glute movement. We can feel this for ourselves. If we were to take our hands and put them on our butt, and we go down here, and we let the knees go – you’ve probably seen people squat like this, by the way. You let the knees go. 

Not only is this a recipe for disaster for people with knee pain, a lot of times it’s people that have knee pain that are doing this, too. Which makes it worse. But you get no glute activation here.

 Likewise, if I were to take my hands and keep them here and go more to a straight hinge, I definitely feel more activation here in loading of the glutes without the contribution of the knees. But we don’t feel nearly as much as we do when we get the two working together. We’re getting a hinge and a knee flexion at the same time. 

So, we know we need to get those two working in concert. The best way to do it, to prepare ourselves to squat, is not the squat because if you already have these issues, if you’re already performing the squat with a lack of that proper contribution from both the knees and the hips,then what you need to do is focus more on that main muscle driving that. And that’s the glutes. 

How to perform cable Squats? 

We do that over here. This is with a hip thrust. We could do it up here on a bench and a barbell hip thrust, classic barbell hip thrust. It’s going to require more range of motion,but even as a beginner activity, or someone that’s been squatting for a long period of time, but hasn’t done this prior to doing a squat, try it here from the floor becauseit’s going to be very simple. Again, I’m not into spending a whole lot of time doing this, guys. You guys know I don’t waste a whole lot of time with warmups. 

The fact is, what we’re trying to do is neurologically wake up the muscles that are supposed to be contributing to the squat inthe way that they do when we squat. That is, we need to get the hamstrings and glutes to work together, and we need to get them to work together through flexion. Combined flexion. 

If I get down here on the ground what does the hip thrust do for us? Well, here’s flexion of the knees. I’ve got flexion of the hips. What we do is train the hamstrings and glutes to work together because we know the hamstrings have a secondary role beyond knee flexion to drive us into hip extension with the glutes. That’s what the hip thrust does. So, I take the bar, I drive it down into my thighs, and I lift up. Now, I hold it here. 

Again, I’m trying to awaken the muscles of the posterior chain. We’re going to explain why in a second when we go back to the bar, why it’s so important. But I want to wake them up and I want to get the hamstrings and glutes working together, which is exactly what the hip thrust does. I drive and allow myself to feel the hinge,number one, but control it as well. That’s going to be important when we go back to the bar. So, we come up, and then feel the hinge as we go back down. 

Now, a secondary thing we could do here, which I think is beneficial, is to allow the feet to get a little closer together, and the knees to drop out to the side.

Cable squats : Best exercise tips -

What this does is externally rotates the hips and gets the glute medias contributing as well. Which is usually very dormant, or inactive,or not necessarily willing to be ready to squat unless you do something like this. So now we perform the repetitions like this. So, you could do two sets. Either both of them with the knees further out than the feet, or alternate. Do one set straight ahead and one set down. 

Why does this work so much? Well, even during that bridge we have some degree of flexion-extension of the knee. Which helps to warm up that knee, for those that have, even some issues with knee pain because they’re not properly warmed up.

 More importantly, what’s happening is when you have an unwillingness to load posteriorly, the knees take the brunt of it. So, if I get under the bar here and I don’tload posteriorly, I tend to be more knee-dominant. The knees keep traveling forward, and they keep travelling as you go down, taking on the load, down and into the knee cap. We call it ‘hanging out our tendons and ligaments’. Our connective tissue. We get a lot of strain, particularly on the patellar tendon if that’s the case. We need to be able to load more in the posterior direction. So, we get up here and with a willingness to do so, we can get our glutes involved here so we can sit back. Take that anterior force off the knee. 

Important things about cable Squats :

More importantly, the hamstrings, as we’vesaid, that were active on that hip thrust are trained to eccentrically control hip flexion. Remember, they have a secondary role. Forget knee flexion. Hamstrings are not flexing your knees to get down to the bottom of a squat. They don’t do that. Gravity takes you down. I don’t have to flex my hamstring to get me down to the ground. What they do as a hip extender is, they eccentrically control hip flexion. So, if I have eccentric control here of hip flexion, I can get down there in a confident way, to be able to position myself with a properly loaded backside. Now, how does it fix the ascent? 

The second, and most important thing you can do from the bottom of a squat is synchronize your upper torso and your pelvis to move together. From here, straight up like that. If you lack either activation of the glutes or proper strength of the glutes, what winds up happening is you’ll get a de-segmentation of your torso and your pelvis.

So, you go down, you might look good, and then you do this. There, up, and then up. De-segmentation. Down, come up, you load there, you bail because you don’t have proper – you’re not driving the movement from your glutes – you turn it into a low back until the glutes can contribute, and then you come and try to do the rest of the work for you. If you do the hip thrust, you’ll train your body to let the glutes be the main driver. That is a glute-driven exercise. Let the glutes be the main driver of the movement. Especially from a hinged, flexed position. That will carry over well, to the point when you get down to that bottom of the squat here and you’ve got to drive up with a straight bar path. As soon as you do that the bar path has changed. 

You want to be able to come from there and let the glutes drive straight up. And if the glute medias is active as well,the knees will be able to maintain that proper, outward positioning that we know we need to maintain proper mechanics of the squat from the bottom to the top. 

Quickly. Don’t make it a big deal. Start your workout over there, then come back over here. Just two sets, about 6 to 8 repetitions, hold for three or four seconds at the top, and then come over here and do this. I promise you, if you’re somebody with knee pain like I mentioned, you’re going to feel so much better just by doing those two sets before here. 

And cumulatively as you do this, of courseyou’ll be working your hip thrust into your regular training as well, you’ll start to get less and less problems over time. And for the guys that should be squatting more, sometimes it just comes down to an activation. You just don’t have proper activation before stepping under the bar and repeating the same pattern here with the squat itself. It’s not enough to break that pattern that you get from targeting them directly through the glute bridge. 

Conclusion

If you’re planning to start out with some cable squats, make sure to increase your weight, performing 8-15 reps for the first week or two of your practice. After that, increase the number of reps and decrease the weight. A heavy enough weight will be enough to induce training induced hypertension (or elevate your heart rate), which will help you burn fat and build up muscle. Also, watch your form during these squats. To ensure you’re doing the exercises properly, it’s important to do them with the correct form. For starters, you should have the right shoes for your feet, and a good anchor point. If you have a lot of weight on the bar, then it’s best to put it on a bench instead of the floor. You can also try squatting on a bosu ball.

If you’ve found this helpful, leave your comments .  

ALways at the end of every workout. Add this, guys. I promise it will work just as well. See you soon.