And when I say heavy partials, I have used box squats in the past, but only when I am having trouble with a sticking point above parallel… Never just squatting high
This statement assumes that the lifter is not prone to knee injury using partial squats.
I don’t know exactly what muscles are neglected but my take on it is that most inexperienced lifters won’t get much benefit when they’re still in the early stages of technique development since they are still learning which muscles to fire and how to maintain position. For an experienced lifter it can be useful if the partial squats provide an optimal training effect to build their full squat.
They can probably do other movements to build the bottom portion of their full squat such as front squats. Again this would only be beneficial to experienced lifters where they can afford to do variations of the lift for their main work and don’t need to spend time reinforcing technique for a competition squat. If doing partial and front squats helped me progress faster then I would do it despite people judging me for cutting the lift high in training because what matters is the performance on the platform.
The front squat would help with speed out of the hole and the partial squat would allow the lifter to handle really heavy loads. At this point I am far from perfecting my full squat technique so I can’t consider it as an option yet lol. You have to experiment for yourself.
[quote]lift206 wrote:
This statement assumes that the lifter is not prone to knee injury using partial squats.
I don’t know exactly what muscles are neglected but my take on it is that most inexperienced lifters won’t get much benefit when they’re still in the early stages of technique development since they are still learning which muscles to fire and how to maintain position. For an experienced lifter it can be useful if the partial squats provide an optimal training effect to build their full squat.
They can probably do other movements to build the bottom portion of their full squat such as front squats. Again this would only be beneficial to experienced lifters where they can afford to do variations of the lift for their main work and don’t need to spend time reinforcing technique for a competition squat. If doing partial and front squats helped me progress faster then I would do it despite people judging me for cutting the lift high in training because what matters is the performance on the platform.
The front squat would help with speed out of the hole and the partial squat would allow the lifter to handle really heavy loads. At this point I am far from perfecting my full squat technique so I can’t consider it as an option yet lol. You have to experiment for yourself.[/quote]
Excellent perspective on the matter. For building the bottom of the squat, I have found that the solution is to simply employ more partials. Many people have it in their heads that a partial always has to be a lockout, but in my training I spend a significant amount of time training squats that start at the bottom of the movement and never lockout, to balance out the amount of work I spend at the top of the ROM.
What you’re talking about with technique reinforcement boils down to the intent of the lifter/lift. If your goal is to use your lifting as a practice session to drill the lift proper, you want to use full ROM. If your goal is to make the lift stronger, you want to use whatever accomplishes that.
[quote]T3hPwnisher wrote:
Excellent perspective on the matter. For building the bottom of the squat, I have found that the solution is to simply employ more partials. Many people have it in their heads that a partial always has to be a lockout, but in my training I spend a significant amount of time training squats that start at the bottom of the movement and never lockout, to balance out the amount of work I spend at the top of the ROM.
What you’re talking about with technique reinforcement boils down to the intent of the lifter/lift. If your goal is to use your lifting as a practice session to drill the lift proper, you want to use full ROM. If your goal is to make the lift stronger, you want to use whatever accomplishes that.[/quote]
I completely agree. Any partial movements I have done in the past only had maximum carryover when I followed the same bar path as my full range of motion lift since the same muscles are targeted and technique was reinforced in that correct bar path. However, I am impressed by people who follow Westside and can increase their strength and maintain their form even without doing the competition lift often. My technique has a lot of room for improvement but that also means there are plenty of gains available 