Exodus Strength

I have noticed for a couple years that wearing a hip circle/band whiling squatting makes the movement feel "good" and more comfortable. I am 100% not sure it helps with the mechanics or depth, though I suspect it contributes positively to both. I would like to be able to replicate the sensation without using the band.

Pushing my knees out, spread your taint and other cues don't register and may have caused harm. I have injured my right thigh/groin area a couple times now - most recently a few months ago - when squatting with relatively light weight and consciously trying to cue my legs/knees/taint to spread out. Initially felt like popping sensation followed by sharp pain & instability, neither instance showed any damage on x-rays or even bruising,

Also when using the band for warmup and a few working sets then taking it off does not seem to directly carry over - still feels uncomfortable sans band and right now a little painful due to aforementioned injury. Wearing the hip circle while squatting in perpetuity is fine; however, I do plan to another meet someday, so carrying over both the banded tactile cue/sensation and what I perceive to be superior mechanics & depth to a competition would be nice.

THe first answer that occurs to me is to compete in a single ply class.

bobmen10000 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:41 am Pushing my knees out, spread your taint and other cues don't register and may have caused harm. I have injured my right thigh/groin area a couple times now - most recently a few months ago - when squatting with relatively light weight and consciously trying to cue my legs/knees/taint to spread out.

As always with squat shit, qualified by the fact that mine is weak.

That out of the way, same experience here. I hate those cues and found them worse than useless - actually harmful. How’s your foot pressure? I’ve found that when a squat feels shitty, inevitably one of the six points came off the floor or at least lost pressure. Seriously, every single time.

Well I'd try working on the problem it's solving for you -- weak/sleeping glutes.

I prefer warming up with the hip circle in glute bridges, then warming up my squat without it. You can pause some reps a couple inches above bottom on the ascent and squeeze the shit out of your glutes (Squat University hack) to get them firing for the specific motion too.

I also found a helpful cue from Mike T's podcast. Don't remember his guest but he was spent the whole podcast talking about rotation. Keep your feet planted and screw them into the ground. This creates similar tension as the hip circle and gets your glutes involved as well.

Try focus on spreading the floor with your feet.

I’ve noticed this and wondered if it isn’t an anatomical thing.

That is, having something to squeeze against let’s you adduct hard, moving the femur further out of the path of the ASIS and effectively creating more room for those tissues. But the knee joint is not too far out of place (varus) because the circle keeps your thighs from pointing out too far.

In this model, trying to adduct that hard without a force counteracting you (ie, spreading the floor super hard without ring) gets that job done at the hip, but puts the knee in a worse spot and maybe predisposes to adductor strains. This fits my experience at least - pain with hard unopposed adduction at lateral knee and general less smooth squat feeling

I've had problems with standard cues as well. I believe my problem arises from my tendency to over interpret the cues, leading to a max-effort shove the knees out attempt," etc. I think cues can be damaging when over done like that. Like big toe pressure. It's not pushing your big toe down with all your might, but rather, push it down so you feel it.

For squat, I've always had a knee cave issue. The cue to begin the decent by shoving my knees out has helped quite a bit. And I'm not shoving them out with all my might, just enough. FWIW.

BigDave wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 6:50 pm I’ve noticed this and wondered if it isn’t an anatomical thing.

That is, having something to squeeze against let’s you adduct hard, moving the femur further out of the path of the ASIS and effectively creating more room for those tissues. But the knee joint is not too far out of place (varus) because the circle keeps your thighs from pointing out too far.

In this model, trying to adduct that hard without a force counteracting you (ie, spreading the floor super hard without ring) gets that job done at the hip, but puts the knee in a worse spot and maybe predisposes to adductor strains. This fits my experience at least - pain with hard unopposed adduction at lateral knee and general less smooth squat feeling

Like @KarlM said, I think this is abusing the cue. Which again is why I wouldn't warm up with squats with the hip circle then try to apply this cue/the same force, because there's no counter balancing force.

As I said, what works well for me is "screwing my feet into the ground" -- more specifically, make sure you really feel the ground with all three corners of your foot, and invision that pressure is enough to drill a hole into the ground, with the drills being your legs in external rotation. Yes you can absolutely overdo this cue as you mention, but it's easier to overdo it if the focus isn't the foot. It has to start with the foot, and you simply need to "rotate" enough to feel the tension, not so much that your legs actually move.