If you ain't squatting, you ain't lifting — and if you ain't squatting heavy, you ain't squatting. Here's how to get it right.
Find the Right Movements
Training needs to be purposeful. You can spend all the energy in the worlds on movements that don’t carry over to your competition lifts, and you won’t progress. Or, you can spend that energy on the right movements, and watch your numbers skyrocket.
In my opinion, balancing the posterior chain, quads, and abs is crucial to building a big squat. Most lifters will favor either the posterior chain or the quads; the former will tend to shoot their hips up out of the hole, and the latter will feel uncomfortable using the leverage that a low bar position provides.
Brandon Smitley has a wonderful list of movements that can help here, but for my money, if you’re a posterior-chain dominant lifter, front squats are the way to go. And if you’re quad dominant, start hammering heavy good mornings. No other lifts, in my experience, carry over as well.
Fix Your Technique
Now, finding the optimal technique is really tough – but it’s also really important. It’s tough because everyone is different, so “optimal” technique for you might look completely different than what’s optimal for someone else. That’s okay – if you can lift progressively and safely with a given technique, you’re in good shape.
But if you can’t do that, obviously, you’re going to have trouble getting stronger. Besides limiting your ability to demonstrate muscular strength, suboptimal technique will make it really difficult to identify (and fix) your true weaknesses.
Your best bet for finding optimal technique as quickly as possible: get a great coach. Your second-best bet is to watch this video and pay close attention to the general principles that everyone should keep in mind when squatting.
Use Your Knee Wraps Better
Obviously, better knee wraps alone won’t magically let you squat 800 pounds, but if you think that you’re not getting much carryover (and you’re using a good wrap like the Elitefts Krait), then you could probably do better. A lot of guys will go on and on about how much harder it is to squat in knee wraps than in sleeves, and that’s really not true — as long as you’re choosing the right style of wrap for your squat, and wrapping your knees in the right way.
What’s the right style? Well, if you’re a raw squatter, you’re probably only concerned about rebound: the more the better. Most raw squatters don’t benefit from casting. It’s worth considering tightness, too: tighter wraps tend to give more rebound, but they’re usually uncomfortable, especially for rep work. For the majority of your training, you might want to lean towards a wrap with less tightness but still a good amount of rebound.
You have to wrap the wraps the right way, too (say that ten times fast). Need help? Watch this video:
And if you need more advice, check out this article.