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Hey how come it seems like you are focusing on front squat rather than back squat?  Is it because you are more posterior chain dominant rather than quad?

Im just a much better front squatter and a poor backsquatter. I like front squats more than back squats. Both to perform and to watch. I have a bad sticking point with back squats which prevents me from doing them well with a lot of weight. When my form breaks down with backsquats with even moderate weights, its very dangerous and unsafe. I train alone and even with limit front squats I can fail safely without risking injury, just ride them down to the pins, no problems. With backsquats i'd get bent over it would put my back in a precarious position prone to injury, no thank you, esp when i've got a history of chronic sciatica behind me that I don't want to invoke anew.

The other thing is my fs and bs are very close together. Some people can handle a lot of weight on the back than front, i am not one of those. So I don't gain much from putting the bar on my back as opposed to on my chest. I lose some, form and safety, so the trade off just isn't there for me to focus on backsquats.

Lance thinks my backsquat turns itno a squat morning because i learnt to backsquat badly (hip driven) so front squat acts to remedy that tendency. I have found him to be right about this after focusing on front squats and seeing my squat mornings turn into nicer back squats.

Re pc dominant vs quads, honestly i have no clue. lance thinks i need more quad strength and i'm inclined to agree with him because i've noticed my quads not powering me out of the latter half of squats (both fs and bs). And my hamstring strength sucks for that matter, which is another reason i do backsquats - as an assistance exercise to help strenghten and build hamstrings & lower back. If i were to guess i'd say im very glute dominant, i power out of the hole easily.

did i mention i love front squats? lol. i think they're a purer exercise, a better test of athleticism. I've heard guys like Joe Defranco and the venerable yo elliot say the same thing so it must be true 

Thinking about front squats and athleticism and my experience with the lift so far. I think a good minimum for an athlete might be 1.5*BW - in fact that's probably too easy because a good athlete would be around 10-12% bodyfat and 1.5*BW isn't a big deal. But like I said minimum.

A 80kg athlete who is lean would need to front squat 120kg at a minimum, i'd say 140kg or 3 plates would be a decent front squat for a lean 80kg athlete. Incidentally 140kg is 1.75xBW which I have put down as my training goal for the medium term.

While i am around 80kg right now, that minimal goal of 120kg is just beyond my current reach annoyingly.  But i'm not a lean athlete, im a fat unathletic guy who happens to weigh an overfat 80kg. If I was 10-12% my bodyweight with my lean mass I would be around 74-77kg (guessing here) and that would mean a 1.5BW minimum front squat would be in the range 110-115kg, which I have done already. So if I keep my current maxes and diet down to ~75kg, i'd easily have a minimal 1.5BW front squat but because i'm overfat it counts against me because for my current weight the minimal front squat is just out of my reach.

It's interesting how good the front squat is in informing me about my (lack of) athleticism. I don't think 120kg is hard by any means for someone my bodyweight, it should be easy for someone who is a lean 80kg. That's why I call it minimum.

If I was to speculate - a great athlete would have an easy 2BW front squat. For someone lean and 80kg -  160kg sounds about right at a minimum and this goes up to 180kg for a 90kg athlete. A 90kg lean athlete would be a genetic beast though and 180kg would be nothing for such a person but a great long term goal for someone who wishes to be athletic..

Going forward supposing I finish the cut to 10% in the next 2-3 months and i'm then 75kg @ 10%, front squatting around 115-120kg. That's an easy 1.5bw going on 1.6bw. So not a bad place to start gaining athleticism (as opposed to shedding unathleticism by cutting bodyfat). So now i have great insulin sensitivity thanks to low bodyfat, i'm allowed to gain a solid 5kg of mass while staying at or below my max bodyweight limit of 80kg. I can train at a surplus as opposed to the deficit i've been on for the last 6-12 months. Gaining 20-25kg on my front squat while allowing up to 5kg weight gain seems like a sure bet. I mean if anything I'd say it should be fucking trivial really - challenging would be adding that 20kg to the bar while trying to stay under 77kg say.

The thing is though im not going to fall into the trap of gaining a lot of bodyweight quickly just to easily progress my lifts. Because it's utterly useless to me to gain 20-25kg on my squat if it means having gaining 5kg of fat. That doesn't help my athleticism in any way - and then getting rid of that extra fat would take a lot of cutting which i would rather avoid. I think my chances are good of being ~13% bodyfat if I do gain 5kg from 75kg to 80kg provided I gain them over a period of a few months rather than weeks. My main goal wont even be to gain mass - it's to become more athletic, ie to push the lifts up while staying lean. In future i will take a break from strength and athleticism and train purely for mass gain - i would like to be a lean 85kg one day and there is a place for mass specific training. But in the meantime, i'd prefer to be a maximally strong 77kg front squatting over 140kg than a fat 80kg @ 15% bodyfat with the same lifts.

How does the mirror test work? If you can see your abs poking thru the fat does that mean you're not fat? If a barbell falls in an empty gym does it make a sound??

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

I'm watching it bro, just install proxtube first.

were they running double-leg jumps? when i first started practicing them a lot i got asymmetrical soreness/aches because i always plant LR. left hip ended up feeling wonky. but it went away with time and i do enough bilateral stuff that i'm not worried about it.

Thank you. I don't do max running jumps on concrete, it's asking for ankle trouble. All I did were a few double leg SVJs. I get what you are saying though, if i was doing running jumps I do prefer to plant right leg first and then jump off left leg and it's important that to have ruled that out as the source of trouble since I didn't do any rvjs.

I think even in squats i'm left side dominant, not so much in front squats which are more symmetric but in backsquats. i have been working consciously on pushing with the right leg in backsquats because it's usually happy to just chill and go along for the ride given by the left leg. I might be unconsciously doing the same thing in jumping too. I wonder.

Last night I did my usual array of hip, glute and ham stretches which I do whenever i'm having problems. This morning I feel much better thankfully. I should probably do a few jumps regularly now to loosen up the imbalance and keep things nice and mobile. And regular stretches might not be a bad idea either, i tend to stop doing them when things feel good.

Hey bud, I am about a month away from going on a cut.  You gave me a good advice on eating about 80% great, rather than going for 100%.  Should I focus on restricting carbs or restricting fat more.  In other words, which poison should i pick?  I am quite fat right now, with a rubber ducky around my 6 pack.

Re restricting carbs or fats - both. Sit down and work out how many calories you should be eating a day. If you don't know, get a good estimate and work with that. Take 15-20% off that to get a caloric deficit and you're left with your daily caloric goal. Say it's 2000kcal.

Next work out how much protein you should be eating - say it's 150g (1g per pound of lean mass). That means 600cal of your intake is gone towards protein, so you're left with 1400cal to split over fats and carbs. That's the only restriction that matters, how you split them up is UP TO YOU. If you need a good amount of fats in the morning so you feel full thru out the day, go for it. If you need more carbs at night to sleep better, then just do that, it'll do the job just fine.

Once you've worked out your calories and macros, draw up a breakfast, lunch and dinner. And choose foods you actually enjoy but fit your macros and calories. Some people pick super healthy foods they hate, and then they invariably find themselves avoiding sticking to them, avoid that. If you hate oatmeal don't bother, find something else you like. Then eat that every day. Sure it's boring and monotonous, but it will work. After a few months you'll have good results to show for it without needing to do anything fancy.

If you'd prefer to freestyle it as you go, measure your calories and make sure you dont go over your daily limit - that can work for some ppl too, but i've never tried that myself so I can't say much about it.

Don't fall into the trap of picking a huge deficit and then finding your workouts suck and you can't lift what you want - it's possible to progress while cutting just aim for 1-2lb weight loss per week and be dedicated (80% compliance over 3 months is better than 100% dedication that only lasts for 5 days ). Good luck get ripped man.

Training
FS 5x1x107.5
BS 3x100, 5x1x105
BP 5x77.5, 5x1x80
CU 2x7xBW  (PR)
Sprint 5x30m
SVJ 1x5 (PRish range - hit 1" below the wrist on one of them)

FS notes:
Almost perfect front squats. I'm loving dem heavy singles! I have such bad form with heavier sets but singles I can manage to do a decent enough job. Do you agree?

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVBMz9FqDTA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVBMz9FqDTA</a>

BS notes:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp7OgelSTU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp7OgelSTU</a>

Form is much improved. Lance you were right, front squats may have just rehabilitated my squatmorning tendencies! Btw can you see my sticking point? Am I always going to have that or will I be able to overcome it thru training?

BP notes:
Had a crazy idea to do singles for BP too. Why not? Will see how it pans out.

CU notes:
Sure I am a light weight now but fuck these were so easy. I was worried I'd hit my head on the roof, that's how high above the bar I was getting and easily, just flying up like it was noting. The weighted chinups are doing good things for me - watch this space.

Sprints notes:
I used nearmap to locate a new piece of ground that's exactly 30m long. This is an improvement over my usual originally estimated but consistent length of grass in the park. I'm also running on turf now as opposed to grass. I prefer grass, it's just i don't like the bumps and troughs you get on grass which might injure me if i'm going all out. Turf is kinda squishy though, wish it was the hard firm kind.

The bad news is im not close to 4s at all. I checked on nearmap and im around 5m out of the target by the time the beep goes off. On one sprint I felt that was maybe 3m out? That's heaps man. Not sure if i can realistically expect to get under 4s. Maybe if i get real lean, push my squats up, work on my sprint (more than 1x a week), and run while fresh (as opposed to the end of a weights session) - then maybe, maybe i can squeeze the gap down to 2m? Big if anyways. Lets see how close I can get, it's exciting as a goal in itself.

Jumps notes:
i'd say i'm damn close to 32" SVJ now in favorable circumstances, I suspect the park rim is slightly on the high side cos I always seem to jump higher relatively in the gym.

Goal Time:.
I see myself at the end of this year under 77kg/170lb, 10% bodyfat, 20 smooth as butter strict dead hang chinups, weighted chin with 120kg (+40kg: 2x20kg plates), front squatting 120+kg and backsquatting 130+kg. Oh and benching 100kg. While jumping 34+" SVJ and running 30m in ~4s. The only thing stopping me is my dedication. I can do this - 60 days and i'll do wonders for my athleticism, i'm at that cusp of breaking over from unathletic fatty to lean & athletic.