A Girlfriend's Guide To Powerlifting

A Girlfriend’s Guide To Powerlifting: Beginners Guide
A lot of the studies that look at knee-forces during squats don’t take into
account the fact that people can often lift ~2-3 times more weight when
performing shallow squats compared to deep-squats, given that the
muscles involved are in a better position to produce force (Hoff &
Helgerud, 2004. Hartmann et al, 2012). As lifters are stronger performing
shallow squats, they’ll need to lift heavier weights to work the muscles to
the same level, which has been shown to increase the knee-forces to a
similar level as lighter, deep-squats (Wallace et al, 2002. Hartmann et al,
2013). In this case, you might as well just use lighter weights and squat to
at-least parallel, which has also been shown to benefit muscle-growth
(Bryanton et al, 2012).
Another point in favour of deep-squats is that several other sports that
most people would associate with being relatively safe often cause similar
(if not higher) forces at the knee compared to heavy, deep-squats. For
example, jogging can lead to forces of ~3100N and ballet dancers can
often reach forces of over 9000N when landing from jumps (Simpson et al,
1996. Roos et al, 2012). If the human body is capable of withstanding
forces of those levels during everyday running and jumping tasks, it is
capable of withstanding the much more controlled forces experienced
during deep-squats.
Also, you only have to look at the injury-rate among competitive
powerlifters to see that it really isn’t dangerous, with a recent study
suggesting lifters experience around 4 injuries per 1000hrs of training (Aasa
et al, 2017).
Written By Ben Streatfield
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