Monolifting Made Easy: Part 1
By
Jason Pegg
This article applies to three different types of lifters. If you’ve never
squatted in a
monolift, don’t train consistently in a monolift, or do squat in a
monolift but don’t feel solid taking weights out of the monolift, keep reading.
You might find some information that will help your every day squatting. If you
don’t meet any of these criteria but want a chance to learn something, keep
reading. For everyone else, go read Iron Brothers. I guarantee that Jim or
Rhodes have something interesting there to read.
The best part of all of this is that you don’t necessarily have to have a
monolift to become accustomed to using one. Yes, you will still have to walk the
weights out to actually squat them in your gym. However, come meet time, you’ll
be able to set up like you have a monolift in your gym and train what for most
lifters is the hardest part of the actual lift—getting the bar out of the rack.
We’re going to cover everything here from your initial set-up to the sound of
the arms banging the rack at their endpoint.
The first thing that you’re going to do when you get up to the bar is take
your grip. Get your hands in enough so that you can pull your shoulder blades
together and down hard. I can almost guarantee that it’s closer than
where you are at now. If you’re having shoulder mobility issues with getting
your hands in, try wrapping your pinky finger under the bar so that it’s on the
same side as your thumb. It will feel awkward, but it will reduce a huge amount
of stress on your shoulders and elbows. Having a solid, arched, upper back is
imperative to getting weights out of the rack. You won’t be able to get heavy
weights out with a soft upper back.
The second part of the set-up is your feet. Set them forward of your body,
directly under the bar as you stand behind it. It’s much easier to set your feet
prior to getting under the bar than get under and then set your feet, especially
if you’re in your gear with your knee wraps on. In training, have one of your
partners stand to the side of your rack and tell you when your ankles are
directly under the bar. This will help you get the feeling for where you need to
be. This sounds like it’s something non-essential, but at my last meet, I saw a
Masters world record holder with 20 meets under his belt not do this properly,
and he couldn’t get the bar out. He ended up bombing in the squat.
The third part of the process is probably the easiest—getting under the bar.
All you have to do is duck your head under it. Some of you gear whores may need
help. Have your handler push down on your shoulder/upper trap area as you
go. After you come up under the bar and get the bar set on your back, make sure
your handler has you centered up on the bar. This is vital to help prevent
balance issues with maximal weights.
The fourth part of the process is mainly static, but it’s the most important
part. This is also the step that will get the bar out of the rack. The first
step is to arch your lower back and your upper back at the same time. What we
tell new guys in our gym is to pull their shoulders back and try to touch their
ass to their traps. This obviously won’t happen, but it gives you an idea of how
hard you need to be arching your back. For guys who aren’t doing this now, it
will cramp up and be painful, but it goes away as you get used to it. After your
back is arched hard, pull your elbows down and get your hips under you. You will
have to experiment with this part a bit. Some people like to keep their hips
back some, and others like to have their hips directly under their shoulders.
This part is completely based on personal preference and should be figured ahead
of time in the gym. I like to keep my hips back some because I feel it helps
with balance more.
After everything is tight and you’ve got your hips set and your head up, take
in a belly full of air, push out hard on your belt, and spread the floor with
your feet. If you have done this properly, the bar will be out of the rack and
you will still have the tight arch in your back. This is vital. If you
aren’t right here, your squat isn’t going to be pretty. I guarantee it. The
first few times that you get it done right, it will feel like you’re going to
cramp in your vastus lateralis and glutes. This is normal and goes away with
practice. At many gyms, ours included, we call this “arching the bar out” of the
rack. If you haven’t done it correctly, you have done what we call “quadding the
bar up.”
Quadding the bar up is bad because of the starting position that it puts you
in. It causes your hips to rotate forward, which destroys the arch in your lower
back. This keeps you from pushing your hips back as far as possible to get depth
and prevents your knees from moving forward over the toes. When this happens,
the lifter usually tries to compensate by leaning forward to give the feeling of
depth. At this point, if the lifter has achieved depth, his hips slide back to
where they should have been in the first place when he goes to come up out of
the hole. This wasted effort to get back in position takes away from firing out
of the hole and will often result in a miss. This is what happens nearly 100
percent of the time unless your name is Goggins or Vlad.
If you watch this video of Sam Byrd, you will notice that he “arches the bar
out” to unrack it versus “quadding the weight up.” I can’t find a good side
video for this, but watch his hips and groin in this video. They move forward
and up as he comes out of the rack, but the angle of the hips doesn’t change
because his back is arched tight, and he is pushing out on the sides of his feet
to get the bar out of the rack. (Arching the bar out,
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4ndMpHZTiuY.)
On the other hand, in this video, you can see Mike’s hips rotate forward as
he quads the weight out of the rack, which destroys the arch in his back. He
loses the weight forward out of the bottom. Also, watch his hip position in the
hole. His hips come forward during the descent, and his first movement to get
out of the hole is shifting his whole body back into proper position. If you
watch closely, the bar level actually drops as his hips slide back into
position. This is usually how guys in this situation miss. (Quadding the weight
up,
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0BFfaUE2QrU&feature=user.)
Hopefully, this gives you a good idea on how to get set-up and unrack the bar
when using a
monolift. In Part 2, I’ll cover some things that you can do in your
gym to help you get used to squatting without having a monolift and some
exercises that make it easier to get the bar out of the rack.
Jason is a powerlifter from Muncie, Indiana. He squats high in the IPA and
trains at DC Barbell. He currently lives in Rhodestown.
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