Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Squatting for the Olympic Lifter - Tommy Suggs (1970)

 Strength & Health October 1970


The gym was a beehive of activity as quite a few members of the local high school football team were doing a bomb-blitz-type program in order to be ready for the upcoming pre-season practice. I noticed Charlie over on the lifting platform offering advice to the young trainees.

“Coaching now, huh?”

“Oh, not really. A few fellows were asking me about full squats for football.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Not much, since I don’t know that much. I told them that I do squats and haven’t had any problems with my knees. That seems to be their greatest concern. What should I tell them?”

“Well Charlie, since it’s obvious that many of the younger fellows coming in here will be turning to you for some sound advice, perhaps I’d better give you some information on which to base your suggestions.”

“Good idea, I hate to be left without an answer.”

“I bet you do.” He sat down on the incline bench and gave me his full attention. “The full squat has been under attack ever since Dr. K.K. Klein wrote his piece of research in the early ‘60’s. Doctor Klein said, simply, that full squats stretched the ligaments and tendons around the knee joint and made that joint more susceptible to injury, especially in contact sports.”

“Wow, and I’ve been having these guys do them.”

“Hold your horses, I’m not finished. Later research has contradicted this study. It has been found that full squats, when performed correctly, actually prevent knee injuries.”

“How can two pieces of research prove opposite points?”

“There is a lot more to research than merely reporting facts. There is always a certain amount of bias influencing any study, plus there are weak points in any study that other researchers can pick up and refute.”

“Which piece of evidence do you go by?”

“I base my ideas on the full squats more on what experienced coaches tell me. They have shown, as have weightlifters, that full squats are safe if they are done correctly. In fact, they can be helpful in preventing knee injuries.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but I guess I must. Am I doing my squats correctly?”

“As I haven’t watched you squat for a week or two, I’ll wait till I see you do them today before I answer that. Today is a squat day, isn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact, I have two more sets of hi-pulls  and then I’ll be ready.”

“Fine. I have a phone call to make and then I’ll skip right back and watch you.”

As I got back to the platform Charlie had set the bar on the power rack at shoulder height and had loaded it to 125.

“Ready to observe?”

“Ready”

He took the bar off the rack, puffed a few times and dipped to parallel. He came up quickly, puffed, and did four more similar movements. He looked over at me hopefully. “Okay?”

“Nope.”

With a disgusted expression, he took off his belt and sat down beside me.

“Who taught you to squat like that?” I asked.

“Joe Dobbs.”

Joe Dobbs is a linebacker on a pro football team. He trains with us just before summer camp. He weighs 265 and could hunt bear with a switch. Most of the fellows follow him around like puppy dogs listening to his grid-iron war stories.

“No reflection on Joe, but Joe is a football player an you are training to be an Olympic lifter.”

“So, we both need leg strength, right?” Charlie had a point and knew it so continued to push it across. “If he is getting his legs stronger with this style, then I should be able to do the same. Tell me that’s not true.” He sat back, crossed his arms and looked extremely content.

“Charlie, you will get your legs stronger doing squats like Joe Dobbs, but Joe does not need strength in exactly the same areas as you do.”

He unfolded his arms. “Explain.”



“In order for you, or any Olympic lifter to recover from a deep squat clean or squat snatch you have to have thigh and gluteus strength to bring you out of a rock bottom position. You never touch that position with your half squats that you are doing now. Also, you have your feet very wide. This throws the stress more on the lower back than on the legs. This is an area that the Olympic lifter works with other exercises. The reason he does squats is to strengthen the legs, not the back.”

Charlie looked a bit puzzled. “Then why does Joe do them that way?”

“Because he was taught that way when full squats were taboo. Besides, he is getting sufficient leg work for his sport. Joe Dobbs never, or almost never, comes out of a full squat position with a barbell loaded to twice his bodyweight on his chest – like lifters do. I might add that Joe would be far better off doing full squats, but he has been quite successful with his program so isn’t too keen on changing.”

“Go over what I should do again.”
“Step-by-step. First, set the bar high on the back, above the traps so that the legs will be doing the bulk of the work. Second, set the feet in a stance that you assume when you squat clean a weight. If your feet hit fairly wide at the bottom of the clean do your squats from that stance. You want them to relate as closely as possible to the lift itself. Third, go down slowly and do not rebound at the bottom, then come up as rapidly as possible. This is the key to protecting the knees. Rebounding is the culprit when it comes to injuring the knees.”

“Then I shouldn’t bounce? I can do more that way.”

“Perhaps you can’t now, but I can assure you that if you begin stopping at the bottom you will be able to do much more in no time. And you will never have to worry about hurting the knees.”

“How long should I pause at the bottom?”

“Just a dead stop is sufficient. Also, you should stay solid and tight at the bottom, don’t relax.”

“What else did you see?”
“You don’t need to huff and puff so much for each rep. If you were knocking out 10-20 reps it would be different, but you are only doing fives. Take a breath at the start of the squat, hold it while you go down and up, then exhale and inhale again.”

“I’m going to start over. Stay and watch!”




“Certainly”

This time he set the bar high on his back, set his feet slightly wider than shoulder width with his toes pointed slightly outward, took a breath, went to the bottom, stopped and came back erect. He shot a quick glance over and asked, “That better?”

“Much better. Try and look up a little more next rep. it helps to keep the back flat.”

He knocked out four more reps, loaded the bar to 150 and sat down on the incline bench.

“Well Charlie,” I asked. “how did those feel?”

“Fine. I just hope that I don’t drop the weight back too much.”

“I don’t think that you will. Anyway it’s more important to work the Olympic lifting muscles than just to handle big weights. I would rather have you doing five deep squats with 225 for 5 than 275 for 5 in the manner you were just doing them. This way we know how strong you legs really are. This is not the case in the half squats as the back does most of the work. How are your front squats coming along?”

“Not too good I’m afraid.”

“I’m not surprised. The half squats were not getting to the gluteus and that’s an important area in front squatting. The front squats will pick up once you get the back squats going in this style. You should have an almost identical body position for the front and the back squats. The only difference being the bar sets on the chest for one and on the back for the other.”

“Why do we bother with fronts?”



“Basically for positioning for the squat clean. Also they work the legs and glutes in a little different angle. The best way to check pure leg strength is with a front squat. The foreign lifters never ask ‘what can you squat’, but rather ‘what can you front squat.’ I once saw a lifter, who held the American record in the squat with well over 500 pounds get pinned with a 325 squat clean. That’s why we do front squats once a week.”

Charlie was attentively shaking his head and I saw that he had heard enough for one day. He jumped up, “Well I better finish these up. I have a date.”

“Sure, didn’t mean to hold you up. See how your legs feel tomorrow. I would venture to guess that they would be a little sore, indicating that you worked some new muscles today.”

“Oh, great. Nothing like some new sore spots.”

“All part of our happy sport, Charlie. You’ll learn to love soreness as time goes on.”

“Don’t count on that.”




9 comments:

  1. There's a great article written by Starr and I'll bet on that. His writing was a couple of levels above the other types who typed to pay the bills. Good one here!

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  2. Keys to P was from '65 to '72. They sure mimicked the mother, didn't they just!

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  3. This has little or nothing to do with the posted article. There's JCG and there's JMC . . . John McCallum. The latter's writing in my view was equally head-and-shoulders above all the others, similar to Grimek's physique being so far above those in his peak era. I've read the KTP series so many times, and not for the training part of them really,. That only took once. He brings in and brings up all manner of topics on his mind and finds a way to slip them in nicely in his articles, and not just the intro sections. He led, others followed. I'd say JMC was the next step moving forward after Charles Smith, who in similar fine fashion managed to somehow, however hopeless it may have seemed, lift the average lifter's level of engagement with things non-lifting and often literary/historical. You can mock me, call me a fool for seeing such in these two authors who paid the bills with their words; no matter. That end of it's all gone down the shitter, what with the shift to video influencers, ex-Olympia champions' semi-literate and redundant monotony/monetizing and what have you. Those two, though, Smith and McCallum, reached very high for their times and the rewards, no, treasures of what they were trying to accomplish are still available to us. Or some such nonsense that contains nothing of interest to the average. This current scene sickens at times . . . don't it just! And that's why all this "quaint" crap is here to read.

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    1. Agreed - McCallum was a great writer beyond just the strength world. Did anyone ever physically meet McCallum? There is always some mystery there, because as far as I know, no one at S&H had ever met John. I believe Starr said they would get his stuff every month from somewhere in the pacific northwest and would send him his pay and paths never crossed. Pretty wild that some guy mailed in articles, sight unseen, for several years and established himself as one of the best to ever do it.

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    2. A bit of a mystery man, wasn't he. Lived in New Westminster, a real short trip from me. I like the way he kept secretive in some ways.

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    3. "...ex-Olympia champions' semi-literate and redundant monotony/monetizing". As an iron-head in the bodybuilding department, I'll add to that, "...some with apparently unashamed like-little-girls egotism".

      I could stomach only one-third of the way through Generation Iron's 2024, "Breaking Olympia:The Phil Heath Story". Not only gifted with incredible genetics for posing, but with insufferable brattiness for posturing. Ego in an adult male, I admire. Childish narcissism, needs a corrective session with dad in the woodshed.

      Resurrect Charlie Smith, or figure out how he can be a literal ghost writer, somebody, pleasssssse...!!

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    4. Someone should try and take it a step beyond the tiresome and repetitive; open it up to some better writing and a slightly more adventurous pile of attempts at broadening the scope. Trust me, no one will read it. Generation Iron! Fucking garbage. I can't sit through more than two minutes of that crap. But sure, have at 'er! Anyone up to a challenge may want to expand on Smith, or McCallum or ANY author in the game. No one will read it, and on the off-chance some do it'll be seen as a novelty and the whole deal will go a good half-foot over their heads. But do have at it . . . pointlessness is a huge part of what we are!

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  4. I'm not sure where you'd place Peary Rader & Harry Paschall, but I have immensely enjoyed reading articles from them which quite often were sophisticated. Peary Rader's article on a lifter must think is worth reading over and over again for reflecting and reassessing training goals as well as more important matters in life.

    I I really like Charles Smith but haven't read too much of John McCallum. Whatever I've read of John McCallum's, I've enjoyed and appreciated his writing style. I wholeheartedly agree that the old writers were the best even if the cerebral ones were few and far in-between. You get a sense of the history and the culture in the times all these guys lived.

    I can't even begin to count how many entries I've read on this blog for the history and philosophical insights. Sure, many training methods from this blog I've implemented into my lifting but their personal tragedies, triumphs and way of life have played a huge part in helping me develop mental fortitude to endure the continued adventures of living on this planet!

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    1. Rader, Paschall, and several others were good training writers in my view. Straight shite, though, with Rader being the homespun, down-to-earth practical type with a belief in something-or-other. Paschall was funny at times, not really a great writer of dialogue, incapable of building a scene or setting blah blah . . . I like 'em all for what they attempted to do within the confines of training articles. If we detach from the topic they were enclosed in when writing for rent and bills, if we look at it as writing alone, well, it's easier to see their talents and/or lack of same.

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