Squats Causing Thick Midsection?

Don’t worry about how you think you might look when you try squatting with the bar the first time.

Seeing someone squat with the barbell, even if a bit awkward → Priceless

Seing someone do barbell curls in the squat rack, like last night → Makes me wonder why murder is illegal

[quote]thmgoodw wrote:
Seing someone do barbell curls in the squat rack, like last night → Makes me wonder why murder is illegal[/quote]

You forget, murder is defined as WRONGFUL killing. I don’t think this qualifies.

Anyway, asianbabe, “push” movements are generally any exercise that has the word press in it or is the same sort of movement as one of those-

Dumbell bench press
Overhead press
Push press
Pushups

and so forth. On those days, if you felt anything was particularly lagging behind in progress, you’d do a major push exercise and then “assistance” work for shoulders, triceps, or chest.

Pull movements would be vertical pulls like

Pulldowns
Chins
Pullups

and horizontal pulls like

Barbell bent-over rows
1-Arm dumbbell rows

and any other variation on that theme. The muscles you might focus on as weaknesses there would be rear delts, biceps, lats, and scapular retractors (the middle of your upper back between your shoulder blades, the rhomboids, basically).

Quad dominant vs hip dominant can be a little more tricky - squats are a good example here. Full squats (like olympic lifters do) and front squats are more quad dominant, but powerlifting style squats are more hip dominant. Most deadlift variations are hip dominant, though snatch grip deadlifts off of an elevated surface can be more quad dominant. Basically, the more vertical the torso during the lift, the more quad dominant. The more horizontal, the more hamstring dominant. On leg days, you wouldn’t go all out on both front squats and deadlifts, for example, but would go heavier on one and lighter on the other, then switch which is heavy/light the next workout. This is because even if you’re doing a quad dominant movement (say, front squats), the hips are still used significantly, and it would usually be counterproductive to then try and deadlift heavy and hard as well.

Hope this helps-

Dan