"Push"
It has been eight days now. Eight days of immense pressure buildup. He could feel it within him, almost coiling up like a snake, waiting to make its explosive lunge into the waters below. He got so sick of carrying it with him. "Devil be GONE!" He screamed as he pulled his trousers down and sat on the porcelain throne. After mustering up all of the intra-abdominal pressure he could, with a mighty push he gave it his all...
...but alas, NOTHING.
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Poor fella... All he had to do was stack a couple of phone books under the front of his toilet and he could have defecated like it was nobody's business. Sadly, he was relegated to the torture of a kinked sigmoid colon, zero pressure from his anterior thigh on his belly and a tight puborectalis muscle (the muscle that surrounds the backside of the 'ol anorectal pathway, sometimes clamping down on the pipes). He, like you, could use some deep bodyweight squats in his life to clear the pipes.
Enough about sh!te. Why should I do the deep bodyweight squat (DBS)?!
Now that we have gotten through two straight paragraphs both explicitly and implicitly discussing taking a dump, we can address the other upside of the deep bodyweight squatting on a regular basis. For those of you without the previously mentioned difficulties, A DBS can be extremely helpful in your load tolerance and form with weighted squats, deadlifts, olympic lifts and even tolerating the simple things like playing with your kids on the floor or picking up that pencil you dropped under your desk. The DBS is both functional and fun movement that everyone should master if they want to see improvements in any or all of these tasks!
So, what is the DBS:
DBS is a term used to describe the way of squatting very deep in a, typically unloaded position. Kelly Starrett, brought this movement to the forefront of the rehab discussion when he popularized the 10 minute squat on his Mobility WOD series and caught fire amongst the Crossfit population. The DBS was used long before Kelly brought light upon it in his videos, but this is where I noticed it really start to catch on.
You may recognize this squat from what you imagine a eastern hemispheric family eating around a dinner table. Hell, you may even recognize the famed Slav squat in action near the train tracks all over Poland and the Eastern Bloc as well. The truth is there was no one culture that "invented" it, but rather the way people chill out when chairs aren't really a thing and the ground is not hospitable for booty touching.
The DBS is engrained in us as it closely mimics the developmental squat, or baby squat, and is instinctive and easy to maintain in a balanced and low energy cost position. Now just imagine the possibilities if you were to develop your own DBS posture with no assistance. You'd have your own chair practically built into your legs!
Flexion gapping/movement variability: Standing in extension or even sitting in a relaxed and relatively “turned off” position all day rarely sees any functional and loaded lumbar spine flexion of the entire lower back, sacrum and pelvis. What we are looking for in this instance is movement variability. When in the deep squat, we see a functional position in which we are rounding our low back in an unloaded position, reducing the "shear forces" (I put this in quotations because the role of shear forces is grossly overstated in the low back) on our spine to that of just the bodyweight. This allows the posterior portion of each vertebrae, specifically the facet joints on either side of the transverse processes to open up and create some welcomed separation/distraction in those joints.
Pain modification/fear avoidance: In low back pain populations, many patients are straight up scared to get into a deep squat or even flex their low back at all. They shake like a leaf and wiggle on their way to such a position, looking at me with big puppy eyes as they are sure their therapist is trying to kill them. Whether they feel that they are going to fall over on the way down or that their back is too stiff, brittle, tearing or weak people are fearful of a movement which is supposed to be very natural for us.
For those of us who have low back pain, discomfort or even fear-avoidance behaviors of the deep squat position, holding a deep bodyweight squat can do wonders for you. Chronic low back pain isn't just meant for the retirement home and your older friends. I am sure there are athletes and strong people reading this article right now that can relate that back pain sucks, especially when its persistent.
Chronic back pain of a nonspecific origin affects nearly 90% of individuals and is the single greatest pain-related pathology American's experience from year to year (Deyo & Phillips, 1996). Non-specific low back pain accounts for the MAJORITY of all low back pain felt, ironically. This means that most back pain, has NO anatomical reasoning. Get out the MRI, hell get out the cartoon X-Ray things: you'll notice, there is no anatomical reason, no one structure that on can pinpoint and reiterate that that is why you're in pain.
Awesome BEANBAG or fire ant colony? Hell nah, I'll squat.
"SO WHY THE F$#@ DOES MY BACK HURT WHEN I SQUAT?"
Have you ever known someone with really bad B.O.? Like you can smell them even after they leave the room? You swear you can even smell it when they are nowhere to be found. Well that stinky friend can teach us a little about what you are feeling when you are squatting down. When someone is experiencing low back pain, you can experience smudging in your brains interpretation of your body. When this happens it turns entire area, in this example our low back region, into diffuse stiff or painful slabs. The pain is there even when it, at least in the way of how many think of it, is NOT there. In other words, there is no nociceptive, acute pain stimulus affecting the tissue in the area in which you feel pain! B.O!!!
The DBS is an excellent way to practice dropping into this position of discomfort in an unloaded manner. Try taking your hands and placing them on your low back too. This can help send some afferent (going up) information to the brain about your low back. This overrides the predetermined photo of your low back in your brain and helps "de-smudge" the area. Of course, this does not occur so easily, but the DBS can certainly assist in the overall process of reshaping the brain's perception of the low back.
Functional ankle mobility: We spend 99% of our day in a position of either plantar flexion or very little ankle dorsiflexion. When walking we only see about 10-15 degrees MAX dorsiflexion in late stance (right before our heel and entire foot lifts off the ground to start swinging that leg forward). Outside of that, we are tucked in our bed in plantar flexion (those tight bed sheets) and the deepest squat you get into all day is when you sat on the loo after lunch, and that position took relatively no effort in the way of maintaining that position. How can you expect to spend every and all day like this while only exposing your body to the slightest bit of dorsiflexion when you put 300lbs on your back?! Preposterous! Anyone would have difficulty with maintaining a loaded dorsiflexed position like that!!
Poor ankle dorsiflexion mobility doesn’t allow our tibia (lower leg) to travel forward, bringing the knee back and forcing us to lean more forward on the descent, increasing hip and lumbar spine flexion. Like I said earlier, this isn’t always a bad thing, but if it is as a result of poor ankle mobility and it is loaded that is a double NO-NO!
Breathing Practice:
Breathing is something I often work on with my athletes as adding the "belly breathing" variant to your repertoire can have a few awesome benefits which you can carry over into the weight room. It also just so happens the position of DBS'ing can really aid in your ability to breathe this way. In this position, the front of your thighs are pressing into your belly creating a physical block in which you can breathe into.
As you take your breath in your diaphragm lowers towards your pelvic region, out towards your abdominal wall and posteriorly towards you lumbar musculo-fascial structures creating a cannister-like effect surrounding your spine, aiding in its isometric strength and ability to tolerate load in heavier exercises like your 1RM of 650lbs on squat.
Maybe you could buy yourself one of these? #DeepSquat
To make you realize: IT IS NO BIG DEAL TO BEND YOUR BACK!!
Your discs will not pop out of your back like mini-gun bullets. Your back will not get strained, pulled, torn, slipped or shattered. You are a strong human, capable of handling this position, especially in an unloaded position such as the DBS! It is not always the end of the world to be in a neutral or globally rounded spinal position, no matter where your lordotic and kyphotic areas SHOULD be according to an infographic on the doctor's wall. The DBS is mainly intended to be a pain modifier, to send up some ascending positive feedback of what your lower back feels like. Your brain can then interpret these positions as more harmless and not as impossible or painful as they may seem.
Some things we can assess in the BWS:
As a physical therapist, I am able to tell a lot from the DBS position: Do your knees cave in? (Poor ankle mobility and related compensation); Do your feet have to rotate out or the inside part lift off the floor? (Poor hip internal rotation forces this position); Do your heels come off the floor? (Tight calves); Buttwink? (Poor motor control, tight calves; Do your arches in your feet collapse? Do you require a counterbalance to hold yourself up? Can you breathe? Do you have pain? Acetabular and bony alignment/morphology considerations? The possibilities are endless and these are just a few of the observations you can make as it may get confusing with all of the clinical reasoning that would follow, as my own explanations above are just a single possibility of a possible solution.
Bang for your buck activity
Listen, the only part that really matters to you is the progression towards being able to maintain a proper deep squat position, as pain-free as possible, everyday for an indefinite amount of time (I know it sounds hard, but once you can maintain it for a few minutes, you find that groove). Sure you may begin by having to hold onto a doorknob, coffee table or cubicle corner but eventually, with enough practice, you can clear up a lot of issues you may find in your loaded squat by adding in this very easy to do activity into your daily routine.
The moral of today's story:
It doesn’t take someone with a metal tool scraping at each fascial band along a sling, with extremity differentiation in hooklying supero-lateral myotonic glides to just sit ass to grass and hang out for a few minutes daily. This position takes care of a lot of different things at once, most importantly you body’s recognition that the position is nothing to be afraid of, that there is no need to turn on the stiffness and resistance to drop into a squat.
Reference:
Low Back Pain: A Primary care challenge. Deyo RA, Phillips WR. Spine. 1996;21:2826-2832. doi: 10.1097/00007632-199612150-00003
Fear-avoidance beliefs and pain avoidance in low back pain—translating research into clinical practice. Rainville, James et al. The Spine Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 9 , 895 - 903