Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [152]
Partial squats inside the rack. The other way to do partial squats is inside the power rack with the pins set at a height that produces the desired depth when the bar on your back touches the pins at the bottom. There are, fascinatingly enough, two ways to do these. The easy way is to set the pins at the desired depth, set up the hooks inside the rack, take the bar out of the hooks, squat down to a dead stop on the pins, and then come up. This method permits you to get tight and store some elastic energy on the way down to the bottom even without a bounce, preserving the effects of the eccentric and concentric order of things. The hard way is to load the bar on the pins at the desired bottom position, squat down under it and get in position to squat at the bottom, and then squat the bar up from what is most assuredly a very dead stop. This method is really a challenge at the lower reaches of depth and is hard with even light weights. As with box squats, they get easy at rack heights much above parallel, with so much quadriceps and so little posterior muscle involved that they become good only for producing sore knees.
Figure 7-5. Two ways to do squats in the rack. (A) The top start allows the eccentric contraction to assist the concentric phase even in the absence of a stretch reflex, and it can be used with much heavier weights. (B) The bottom start, with the bar resting on the rack pins, requires that the concentric contraction be started from a dead stop in the hardest position of the movement, greatly increasing the difficulty and decreasing the weight that can be used.
Bouncing the bar off of the pins substitutes for the rebound that your hamstrings and adductors should be providing, thus defeating the purpose of doing the exercise in the rack. The bar should be lowered to the pins, fully stopped, and then driven up. The dead stop from the pins provides the same opportunity to work initial explosion out of the hole that box squats do, without the risk of any spinal entrapment compression. It is easier to get tighter at the bottom if you have had the whole trip down to the box or the pins to do it; it is hard to get in an efficient position to squat if you have to do it while wadded up at the bottom, unable to stretch down into the bottom from the correct position assumed at the top. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method, but by the time you’re ready to do partial squats, you’ll have a feel for which one will work best for you. Just remember: this type of squat training is not for novice trainees.
Notice that these options do not include a half-squat, which would be done from approximately the hip and knee angles seen at the start of the deadlift. The half-squat is an arbitrary position to start or stop in since there is no anatomical reason to do so. The full squat works because the hamstrings and adductors achieve full stretch at this depth, but nothing good occurs at half-squat depth. The positions from which the squat can be trained with useful assistance exercises are all very close to the positions of the full range of motion. Training from the bottom up to the middle and then going back down is useful, as are all the variations that work up from the bottom with a pause to kill the rebound. (The top half of the squat is very easy if the bottom is strong, since the top half is the mechanically easy part; conversely, training the top will not strengthen the bottom.) But unlike splitting up the deadlift, it is not very productive to divide the squat into an upper and a lower component and then train each one separately. The top does not need the work, half-squats are hard on the knees, and the bottom is the hard part of the squat, anyway; in contrast, there is no easy part of a deadlift, and both halves of it can successfully be worked separately.
Partial presses and bench presses. The press, like the deadlift, starts