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followed by a pause and then a drive up. The bounce must be incorporated into the drive – it must be anticipated as the first part of the drive. Think about the “up” drive all the way down during the descent. Don’t think about going down while you’re going down – think about coming up the whole time. Doing this will reduce the tendency to separate the drive from the bounce, because the drive is being anticipated even before the bounce occurs. The timing of your descent and rebound is critical to the performance of good squats. Bounce occurs optimally at the correct speed of descent. If your descent is too fast, the bounce will be less effective, and much less safe, because the only way to drop too fast is to relax something. Muscles tightened in the squat descent store elastic energy; tight muscles also keep your back, hips, and knees in the correct, safe positions. If you are loose enough to drop into the bottom of the squat much faster than you can come up, you need to tighten up more – and it may help to think of this as slowing – on the way down. A loose descent can allow joints to be jammed into positions they should not occupy, and this is how most people get hurt squatting: getting out of good position by going down so fast that they cannot maintain proper technique. This may be how squats got an undeserved bad reputation. Don’t contribute to the problem by dive-bombing into the bottom.

The limit of the adductors’ and hamstrings’ extensibility will almost always be below parallel, as defined earlier. The hamstrings’ length does not change that much anyway, since the knees and hips come into flexion together during the descent. Tension builds on the isometrically tight hamstrings as they approach the bottom; in this way, they control the back angle and contribute to the stretch reflex effect as the rebound occurs. A few people lack sufficient extensibility in the posterior chain muscles, and some people have tight joint capsule ligaments, but not nearly as many people need stretching out as merely need the correct stance, the correct knee position outside the ASIS, and a loud reminder to keep their knees out. The weighted squat has few superiors in the realm of things that go stretch, anyway, and what little stretching is actually needed can usually be done within a few sets of weighted squats that incorporate a correct knees-out descent.

Our previous discussion of low-back position can now be understood in a more complete context. A developed kinesthetic sense of spinal position is necessary for efficient force transfer and for effective athletic performance in general. Relying on ligament tension and general trunk tightness is fine with very light weights, but is really a handicap at work-set loads. If the lumbar spine and the pelvis do not stay perfectly rigid in what can be called “pelvic lock,” force transfer is not as efficient up the spine, and posterior chain rebound is soft because of the less-than-efficient relationship that a loose lumbar spine has with the pelvis and the muscles attached to it. Rigid lumbar extension places the pelvis at a better angle to tighten the hamstrings at the bottom, making a more efficient rebound possible because force isn’t being absorbed by a loose lumbar spine. And the hamstrings produce a more efficient stretch reflex with a rigid lumbar spine at the back angle used in the low-bar squat. Think of it this way: there is a war between the erectors and the hamstrings over control of the pelvis, and the erectors have to win if the back is to stay rigid and the hamstrings are to be used effectively.

If you do not know how to contract your erector muscles in order to arch your lower back, with no tension from the hamstrings interfering, this means that you do not know how to assume this position voluntarily. You do not have the kinesthetic sense to know when the arch is there and when it isn’t, and you can’t put your back in this position at the bottom of a deadlift or keep it there at the bottom of a squat when hamstring tension is at its highest. If this is you, make it a priority