What you will see may seem odd or counterintuitive to you but if you give it a chance I think you will be very pleased with the result. This all started as an experiment in repetition lifts like presses and jerks. A way of making the lifters base and “groove” wider so more reps can be done. Steve Short and I were talking about barbell pressing and I remembered an article by Keith Wassung about pressing technique. I have not been able to find that article again but it recommended using a somewhat staggered stance. I have seen this before in some old books but didn't really “see” it. One of W.A. Pullum's books from early in the century shows this style on some lifts. I does widen the groove on pressing a lot and takes away much of the “stick” in the sticking point. We thought there might be more to this and started doing this same stance also with repetition jerks, same effect. I increased what I could do with dumbell jerks by a full four reps. There seemed to be a bigger principle at work here. Aside from making the jerk easier it also allows a great deal of stable drop without moving your feet. It meant a great many reps to Steve. 10 more reps in the Jerk with 3/4's bodyweight.
Steve, who doesn't have the greatest time in the world doing olympic lifts (long arms) , tried this with cleans also it worked well for him. It got the weight back over a stronger base once it cleared his front knee, allowing for a much stronger “snap” at the top. I tried also but got less from this, though I certainly did better. I think I am so used to classic pulling that it might take a bit more practice.
It gets even crazier though. All this is useful but certainly nothing new. Lifters have been using staggered stances for overhead lifts for a long time. The strangeness came when I, on something of a whim, tried this with the squat. I haven't squatted in nearly a year due to knee surgery and haven't really been looking too much forward to it either after doing aerobics for six months. I tried with 135# then 205#, fine. Aside from the fact that it seemed a little too light and easy for 20reps I didn't think much of it. I thought this would have a lot of application in squating for endurance and strength endurance since once you squat with one leg forward, you can switch to the other and feel pretty fresh again and continue switching every ten or so reps just like with the repetition jerks done before. This is an improvement with a specialized application and I felt pretty good about it especially since it didn't hurt my knee either way, no trouble at all.
I sent this to a couple of other people to try since I thought this ease might be due to some peculiarity of the way I am built with the warning that while this might be good for repetition squatting with lower weights, it might not be good for “maxing out”. I thought about this and wondered “well, why wouldn't it be”? So I went out in the gym loaded up to 225# and it felt like nothing, went to 250#, just as easy, then 315# and still no problem. Squatted down, stood up, no sticking point. Went to 350#'s the next day and it still feels easy in spite of the fact I am coming up on the toes of one foot down in the bottom of this squat. I tried 350#'s conventionally with my normal stance. It was possible but hard and made that painful egg behind my kneecap come up again. No damage but didn't feel too good. My highest raw contest squat is 501# in conventional style with only a belt. I think I could come close to that number in this style without the belt but I am being cautious since I don't want to create problems for myself and I have the time to creep up on it.
To add to this even further, all of these squats were done with the bar up on my traps, if you drop the bar down to the power position on the rear delts, the leverage in this lift is just plain absurd. The leverage difference in dropping the bar seems much greater than in a normal squatting style. All you do is just stand up with it. Adding a belt in might boost it even more, but one of the good things about this style is that there is hardly any back in it. Your back moves but you don't feel much stress there or in the abs. The stress and effort is very evenly distributed and you can tell, once you try, in spite of how it looks.
After trying to figure out how this works and why it became obvious. All the levers are shorter, no sticking point since there isn't a tight groove to track at all and the force is more under you. There is another big factor also that if you think about it, it opens up a lot of doors about other ways to modify lifts. Everything you do is a cycle of “effort, feedback and correction”. A squat isn't a simple push, it is a long series of these cycles that happen well out of concious reach if you are well practiced. The better you get the quicker and more precise this cycle is. It is what science-minded lifters call “neuro-muscular facilitation” and the Pavelite's call “GTG” or “greasing the groove”. In a regular squat, much energy is wasted keeping you on a very narrow track back to front and side to side. If you were to make a model of this it would be two hydraulic cylinders pointed up towards a center with a weight on it. If these cylinders are both of equal strength with smooth duty-cycles then all is fine. However humans don't work like this. We are bilaterally symetrical but only to a degree. If one of those cylinders in our model is weaker or less precise in its motions than the other, then that throws it all off and all movement up must be in short efforts with positional feedback and then a correction to keep the weight centered, throw the front-back axis into the equation and it gets even more complex. A conventional squat is a series of efforts and corrections to keep a weight on a very tight course. Suppose you had a way not to waste so much energy on just keeping the bar on the right path?
What happens in this squat is that the force is under you directly, not so much effort is wasted on “keeping in the groove” since it is such a wide groove. There is no need to wiggle or shift in any part of the motion; you just stand up. I think your body allows you to use much more force if there are not so many corrections and adjustments to be made. You are not making so many small compensations all the way up.
Here is the stance. Give it a chance, don't get too wide or deep:
Here is a picture from the front:
And here is a short video of the squat itself. I tried to slow it down so you can actually see what I am doing. If it is too dark on your screen, turn up the brightness a bit:
