Stiehl,
I may be able to shed some light hear. One thing that King seems to do when writing for T-Mag is call his hip dominant work ‘hamstring dominant’. If you read his books or better yet, see him present in a seminar, he refers to hip work as ‘Glute Dominant’.
This is important because of the effect the glutes have on the pelvis, versus the effect the hamstrings have on the pelvis. In my experience, they tend to be very different.
The hamstrings are considered hip muscles, but the don’t seem to posteriorly rotate the pelvis. Most athletes I see that have very strong hamstrings also exhibit to anteriorly rotated pelvis.
If you think about the anatomy of muscle tissue and where the hamstrings originate, things get a little more clear. Consider that when one does a leg curl (whether they are of benefit to an athlete isn’t the point) the lifter will severly rotate his pelvis anteriorly in order to pre-stretch the hams resulting in more of an elastic effect in the muscle and more strength of contraction.
This anterior rotation also holds true when conditioning the hamstrings through hip extension. So when you do stiff-legged deadlifts, you actually cause anterior rotation of the pelvis in both the exercise and when performing other movements (weight room or otherwise).
With this anterior rotation comes a strong inhibition of the glutes. And seeing as the glutes are really the muscle that determines whether something is ‘hip’ dominant or ‘quad’ dominant and the fact that the effect the exercise has on the pelvis is also a determinant, stiff legged deads are actually more of a quad dominant exercise.
Now if you haen’t read what King says about the effect of squats and deadlifts on the pelvis and what that means for muscle balance and programming (or at least the Cliff notes version I posted above), you’re thinking I’m crazy.
But the fact remains that if you take an athlete with chronic anterior rotation and have them do isolated ham work like leg curls and stiff legged deads, you’re going exacerbate an already bad situation.
So what you feel when you are squatting is an excessive anterior rotation of the spine. You likely feel this because your glutes are inhibited by the contraction in your lower back that’s happening in order to pre-stretch the hamstrings in order to make up for the lack of glute firing. It’s a bit of a viscious cycle.
My advice would be to drop the Stiffies and switch to the technique King outlines in his articles on T-Mag. Learn to fire your glutes while deadlifting and squatting and all will start to fix itself.
Now, how much ab training do you do?
A word of caution. If you have the posture where the pelvis is anteriorly rotated, what’s above is good advice. If you are the opposite and have an excessively posteriorly rotated pelvis, then stretch your glutes and learn to fire your TVA along with your QL and erectors. Holding the neutral lordodic curve could likely be the cure to your ills.
Militant Hypertrophy will give you a good idea on how to assess your pelvic alignment. Do a search on the home page. My guess is that you fall in to the former category though. If that’s the case, I went throught the same thing and corrected it with some thoughful ab work, stretching and technique/exercise selection modifications.