A TALE OF TWO SQUAT PATTERNS — BUT SERIOUSLY, THOUGH: I DID FIX IT IN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES
Last week a man came to Core for his initial assessment. After some friendly back-and-forth, we talked about his training history and any injuries. He said he’d never really done strength training before and, further, that he had a history of chronic lower back pain at L3–L4. Most people can relate. A lot of readers have probably experienced some form of low-back pain at some point. It’s never fun and can leave you feeling frustrated and stuck. In my work with many clients in this situation, my goal in the first session isn’t to label them as a walking list of problems.
Instead, I guide them through a few simple screens, watch how they move, see what aggravates their symptoms, and adjust to try to reduce them.
Low back pain is common and has many possible causes: tight hips, overactive muscles, inactivity, unusual movement patterns, even stress. It’s rarely one thing, which makes it hard to point to a single culprit. So I prefer to get people moving during the assessment. Watching movement across different tasks gives a bigger picture than any one test.
I’ll run several screens on a table—Thomas Test, Craig’s Test, Slump Test, and active vs. passive range of motion—but it’s also crucial to get them off the table and have them show how they move. It’s simply more information.
Without any prompting, here’s what my client’s squat looked like before: he collapsed into an aggressive anterior pelvic tilt as he descended, the movement was quick and lacked control, and at the top he tended to hyperextend the lower back. He finished with lumbar extension rather than hip extension. I showed him the same footage and walked through everything again, suspecting these patterns were contributing to his back pain.
Then I spent a few minutes outlining some basic squat-technique tenets I share with clients:
– Foot pressure and corkscrewing the feet into the ground to ramp up hip torque.
– The abdominal brace.
– The canister position: rib cage down and stacked over the hips.
– The squat as a coordinated effort of hips and knees moving down together, not a backward push.
– Thinking about pulling himself down toward the floor rather than just falling.
– Finishing tall at the top and lightly squeezing the glutes instead of driving the hips forward.
Five minutes later this happened: the squat looked different.
By no means was it perfect, but the goal was progress, and we achieved it. The bigger indicator was that he had zero pain while squatting after these minor technique tweaks, and it didn’t require a long list of corrective exercises to “fix” it.
Sure, I could have told him to foam roll for a long session and stretch his hip flexors, followed by a slew of glute medius exercises—and he might have felt better too. But that wouldn’t have addressed the underlying pattern.
In short: help people find their trainable options. Coach them. Show them what they CAN do, rather than telling them what they can’t.
Unless you’re some all-knowing wizard. In that case I’ll zip it.
The movement should come from the ankles, knees, and hips—not the lower back.
