Skill
Bar muscle-ups
WOD
Back Squat
5 – 5 – 5 – 5 – 5
Take your time, don't rush through it, and post a new 5RM today!
Best Stretch in the World!
Ahhh the back squat. Love it or hate it, the back squat is a fantastic movement. It's one of those movements that gives us so much benefit, and it translates well to many other movements. Check out what Rippetoe has to say in Starting Strength:
The back squat is literally the only exercise in the entire repertoire of weighted human movement that allows the direct training of the complex movement pattern known as hip drive. The posterior chain is a term that refers to the muscles that produce hip extension – straightening-out of the hip joint from its flexed (or bent) position in the bottom of the squat. The muscles that accomplish hip extension are the hamstrings, the glutes, and the adductors or groin muscles, and together these are referred to as the posterior chain. The initial movement up out of the bottom of a full squat is hip drive, and is best thought of as a shoving-up of the sacral area of the lower back, the area right above your butt. This is the hardest thing to teach in my preferred method of squatting, and by far the most important.
This is because the squat is the only exercise in the weight room that trains the recruitment of the entire posterior chain in a way that is progressively improvable, and that is one of the things that makes the squat the best exercise you can do with barbells and, by extension, the best strength exercise there is. These important muscles contribute to jumping, pulling, pushing, and anything else involving the lower body. The squat trains the posterior chain more effectively than any other movement that uses them because none of the other movements involve enough range of motion to use them all at the same time, and none of them work this long range of motion by preceding their contraction with an eccentric lowering, which produces a stretch-shortening cycle or stretch reflex.
See, Rip thinks the squat is awesome, so it is. That's truth right there. Go big today!
