Squat Cue: Bring The Lower Obliques To The Thighs

Squat Cue: Bring The Lower Obliques To The Thighs

If you watched my YouTube video last week (CLICK HERE), in discussing how to cue the hip hinge, one of my favorite cues is “bringing the lower obliques to the thighs”. I showed this by just simply putting your thumb on your lower oblique, your middle on your thigh, and then pinching them together. Doing so will almost immediately create a pretty solid hinge pattern. Well, it can work in the squat too. Here we have a side by side of @zbroderick83 and a bar tilt issue he was having (CLICK HERE). Breaking this down, he is crunching into that right oblique while lengthening and flaring his left side. Even with trying to cue better reference with the obliques, things just weren’t clicking. If we really focus on what that left side is doing, its improperly hinging and his ribcage is flaring. Even though the squat isn’t a hinge in the same manner as a deadlift, there is still a hinge and hip flexion component. So what I did was I cued Zach to drive his knees forward and allow his chest to lean per normal, but also to actively think about pulling his lower obliques into his thighs. Specifically making sure to reference pulling that left oblique into his left thigh, since that is where the disconnect was occurring. That along with an increased focus on constant bracing, not just inhaling and then forgetting to maintain his brace, had a pretty noticeable effect right away. We can see on the right side video a much better hinge pattern coming from his left side. With not even thinking about maintaining tightness in his left oblique, he naturally did so by thinking about pulling that oblique to meet his thigh. I also included a video of me breaking this down in case you didn’t watch my latest YouTube video (shame shame) to help give better reference as to what this cue entails.