Why Does Your Low Back Arch During a Squat? | NASM Overhead Squat Assessment

Arched low back.

So when we go into the squat, it's okay to have a little arch of the low back, just a minimal arch that's normal, that's natural, right? That's what we want.

But when people have a big one, like a ski slope back, which is much more common, what is causing this is tight hip flexors and tight low back.

So let's talk about why.

So as we come down here, you want to think like we're in hip flexion, right? whenever the segments come together, this is going to be hip flexion, right? So as we drop down into the squat, we're in a hip flexion.

If somebody has tight hip flexors, right, then it's going to make this already tighter.

So you want to picture what would happen if you tighten this, what it's going to do if your hip flexors, so come up and down the front of your thighs, if they got too short, what this is going to do is pull your pelvis forward okay so take your hands right now on your pelvis it should be straight up and down and then tilt it forward and you're going to feel how that causes your low back to arch okay so it's the tight hip flexors that are causing it that cause the low back to arch All right, so hopefully that's gonna make sense.

So the other way you can think about these, if you know what a marionette puppet is, like the one that has the strings, that helped me in the beginning to visualize because it would be like, okay, this should be the muscle length, right? If I somehow made that muscle shorter, if I clipped off some of that, how would that change the position of the puppet's body, right? So if we pulled those hip muscles and made them shorter, clipped some off, that would take the puppet's pelvis and tilt it forward, okay? So the pelvis tilted forward results in a back, a low back that is arched too much.

Okay.

So that's that.