First time doing deadlifts this morning for a few weeks....even my forearms are tired and I'm struggling to make a fist
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What are the benefits, if any, of doing front squats instead of back squats?
Not many if you’re not an Olympic weightlifter. For most people....
- If you can’t stay upright in the bottom position because of your limb lengths or mobility, you can’t use any meaningful load (in the sense of stimulus for your legs if you can back squat far more weight) because you’ll be tipped forward too much
- People overwhelmingly lose tightness in their upper backs performing front squats well before their legs fatigue, which similarly to not having a vertical bottom position leads to losing the bar forward and either having to use your arms to keep the bar up and using the back to help, or just dumping it. This results in the same problem as above as far as using effective loads
- The cross grip position isn’t very comfortable, but learning the full clean grip front rack requires a good level of mobility most people can’t be bothered to attain. There’s also the issue of pushing the bar too far into your neck and pressing against your carotid artery; at best a set gets cut early because of light-headedness, at worst you faint and drop the bar on yourself or the pins
For someone who low bar squats, who wants a greater quad-dominant variation in their training to build the legs more specifically, I’d much rather go with either a full range high bar squat, a Safety Bar squat if there’s access to that, or machines like the hack squat or belt squat if available.
If your front squats look like this then maaaaaybe for strength training in certain applications. For hypertrophy... it’s likely no better than doing overhead squats (that is to say, there’s much better things you could be doing that would be more effective). I pride myself on having developed a good looking front squat, but don’t actually use in my training cycles because it’s just not that useful compared to other stuff I could do.
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