Safety Bar Squats – Without the Safety Bar

So I’ll admit it right off the bat: I’m not a big fan of back squats. For one, I suck holy hell at them and find that my back becomes as beaten up as a Yankees’ pinata in Boston in October afterwards. As a result of these factors, I’ve tended to shy away from them in favor of doing things like front squats, deadlifts, reverse grip concentration curls with the pink dumbells.

Part of the problem with back squats is that in order to hold on to the bar I have to stretch my arms into an uncomfortable position, especially since I’ve previously torn my left rotator cuff and have some serious restrictions in external rotation on that arm. Pretty much any time I load a bar on my neck I wind up getting numbness and tingling down the arm as a result of the brachial plexus impingement that occurs as a result of that anterior tightness. No matter how much I foam roll, stretch, scap retract or whatever it seems to be a constant. It never bothers me except with this position.

So you could imagine me figuring out something that I have difficulty doing, or that I can’t do because of pain. This drives me nuts, and I’ve been trying to find a way around it for a few years. Sure front squats are fantastic, but there’s something about back squats that’s drawing me into its crushingly awesome vortex of diesel-dom.

Now there are a few ways around this issue. One is to try a back squat with no hands on the bar, but my cojones are just not big enough to try this.

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Another is to use a more sane approach, which involves using an apparatus known as a safety bar. This is a bar with an attachment piece on it that acts sort of like a yoke around your shoulders, and has handles coming out in front to allow you to hang on in a safe shoulder position, while equally distributing the weight across your neck and shoulders.

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Cool. The downside is that I don’t have access to a safety bar, and the powers that be probably won’t go for it. As a result, I’ve had to improvise and get creative in how I could make my own safety bar that wasn’t actually a safety bar.

Yesterday, I was playing around in my workout, and thought of something. What if I attached lifting straps to the bar, and held on to the straps like a safety bar? Would that be an effective way of repositioning the shoulder and getting some good positional benefit out of the movement without compromising the safety of the lift, or put another area under undue stress (like a zercher squat that can potentially increase strain tot he low back)? Why hells yes!!

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Now there’s a bit of a tradeoff with this specific movement and exercise. Since your hands aren’t in direct contact with the bar, there is a little more movement potential, and the bar has a tendency to slide down the shoulders slightly unless you’re gripping it like crazy, plus there’s a lot less lateral stability to the bar due to the reduced point of contact and width of the base of support that the bar rests on, so balance becomes an issue. That being said, OMFnG I’M SQUATTING AGAIN!!! Honestly it’s been close to 12 or 14 years since I was able to feel this comfortable with a bar on my neck for any length of time, so to be able to throw around a few plates like this was the closest thing I can get to heaven within the confines of a gym without freaking everyone right the hell out, so I’ll take it.