I’d like to write about how I got a decent increase to my front squat personal best in the latter half of 2021. It feels a little self-indulgent, but I’m confident these tips will help you develop muscular strength and set some squat personal bests of your own.
Background
Prior to this, it had been a while since I had made progress in my front squat. That being said, I’ve been squatting (relatively) heavy for around 10 years now. Therefore, it’s safe to say this progress wasn’t a result of newbie gains – I can no longer get a new personal best just by looking at a bar!
The lessons I learned from this training block will probably be most applicable if you’re an intermediate or novice lifter. I didn’t do anything super-advanced, so these strength training tips should be useful no matter what your end goal.
Click here to see why I think it’s important to get strong at front squats, and squats in general. Click here for a guide to a lot of the strength training terminology I use in this blog.
In this next section I go into more detail about my own training in 2021. If you want to skip ahead to the main strength training tips, use this contents table.
Recent Squat Progress
I’ve almost always been able to front squat my bodyweight, but by the end of the UK lockdowns I was both heavier (around 100kg) and weaker/de-trained from only having a 20kg kettlebell at home.
From April-July 2021, I built my front squat back up to 90kg – my previous squat personal best, which had been a bodyweight squat at the time I first lifted it. At the end of this strength training programme, I tried to squat 95kg and failed.
Around September, I decided I wanted to increase my front squat personal best to 100kg by the end of 2021. I had squatted 90kg pretty well in July, but failed 95kg, so I suspected my September squat personal best was 90-92.5kg. By the end of December, I achieved my goal.
Note: as mentioned, I gained a significant amount of weight by the time got my new squat personal best. This alone can work wonders for strength training progress, primarily due to muscle gain. However, I don’t think it contributed greatly to my squat improvement. Firstly, most of my weight gain was in lockdown when I only had 3 kettlebells, so I don’t believe I gained muscle in this time. Secondly, when I first returned to training in April, I actually lost weight, so the chance that I had a higher net level of muscle mass in this period is also unlikely.
Here’s how I was able to increase my squat personal best by 10kg in just over 3 months.
Work Below Your Personal Best
When trying to make strength training progress, it can be tempting to attempt your personal best every week until you either a) achieve it or b) give up. In this example, this would involve warming up and trying to squat 100kg every week. Another common example is being able to do one pullup, and turning up each week attempting to do 2 pullups.
Unfortunately, trying to get a new strength personal best every session is a poor way to increase strength as it results in a lot of failure. Failing heavy reps every week is incredibly strenuous on the body and nervous system, and can lead to burnout and injury.
Even if you don’t fail the lift completely, training at near-maximum each week means you end up completing a very low number of total reps. This means you’re not receiving a great level of stimulus relative to the fatigue you’re experiencing.
When this programme started, I didn’t squat 90kg for the first six weeks – at the time, my squat personal best was 90-92.5kg. When I did squat 90kg again, I was confident it was no longer my 1-rep maximum squat. I spent a few more weeks progressing from 90 to 95, and when that progress stalled, I reduced the weight again.
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 |
| 1×1 – 77.5 3×3 – 70 | 1×1 – 80 3×4 – 70-72.5 | 1×1 – 82.5 3×5 – 72.5-77.5 | 1×1 – 85 3×3 – 80 | 1×1 – 87.5 3×4 – 80 | 1×1 – 90 3×5 – 77.5 | 1×1 – 92.5 4×2 – 85 | 1×1 – 95 4×2 – 85 |
This works if you know what weight you’re aiming for, but you can also use a training max to keep your weights within a sensible limit.
I follow a reserved training approach for most of my training, and I employ this method with clients too. That being said, it can have one drawback when you’re training for strength progress; this leads me on to my next point…
Sticking Points and Grinding Lifts
My time away from strength training had taken away my ability to “grind”. This is where you lift a weight that’s heavy enough to seriously slow you down as you lift. The part of the lift where you have to grind hardest is your “sticking point” – where the weight slows down most and may stop moving entirely for a moment. The sticking point is the hardest part of the lift; to make strength training progress, you have to overcome this part of the lift.
Strength is a skill that requires practice. Training conservatively for too long can diminish your ability to grind at heavy weights. I suspect this is why I failed to squat 95kg in July – if you watch the video, you can see that I give up as soon as the bar reaches the sticking point.
I decided to combine my conservative lifting with a small amount of heavier reps at the start of sessions. This helped me to “feel” heavier weights whilst doing the bulk of my work at more manageable weights.
Be Direct and Indirect
If you want to continue to get stronger long past your early adaptations, you have to be direct about reaching your goal. To get stronger in your squat, you have to regularly perform consistent and effective squat sessions.
However, it’s not realistic or sustainable for most people to squat heavy multiple times a week for 8-12 weeks. This can lead to burnout, stalled progress or injury. In order for the DIRECT approach to be viable, you have to be apply it INDIRECTLY by training different variations of the lift in question.
This means that instead of doing heavy front squats 2-3 times a week, you must incorporate squat variations. Here are some variations that can work:
- Speed squats – lifting lighter weights as quickly as possible will challenge you to contract all the relevant muscle fibres without exposing your joints to as much load.
- Paused squats – removing the bouncy part of the squat forces you to go lighter, and means the elastic parts of your joints (such as tendons) are loaded less aggressively.
- Other squat variations – goblet squats and back squats will still train the squat, but they will slightly alter the stress placed on the body due to different joint angles and lever lengths.
Squat variations also provide slightly different training stimuli. This means you can squat frequently without reducing your body’s sensitivity to front squats. There is a fine line between too much stress and too little, which is why we need to be direct and indirect with our training; we must walk the line between consistency and variety.
My additional squat variation was the hang clean. This is a fun Olympic weightlifting variation that ends in a front squat. My hang clean is significantly lighter than my front squat, so I hang cleaned 60-80kg for the duration of this programme. It’s far from the simplest way to vary your squats, but I’ve done enough prior training with them that I was confident I could add them in. Remember, enjoyment is an ever-important factor in achieving your goals.
Summary
Getting a new front squat personal best was a great challenge, and a great reminder of some of the most straightforward ways to organise a strength training programme and break through a strength plateau. It reminded me that if a programme has a specific outcome, then it needs to be geared towards that goal. That level of focus needs to be tempered by restraint in order to preserve freshness, but there is a happy medium that each person needs to find.
If you’re looking to beat strength plateaus, you can get in touch to find out more about my personal training service in London. Alternatively, you can ask to find out more about my online programmes.
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