In this blog, I detailed the myriad marvelous means by which one can improve their mental and physical strength with the grand poohbah of upper body lifts- the Behind The Neck Push Press.  Well, fuckers, I’ve got another exercise for you to try, and it’s another one for the fucking record books.

Behold the awesome might of the Partial Overhead Squat.


The form on these will be a bit tricky when you first start.  As you can see in the video, I usually have difficulty finding my mark right out the gate.  The setup, however, generally goes like this- line up the way you would for a squat, making sure that your legs are evenly spaced, slightly wider than shoulder width after you duck under it.  Then, straighten your arms as you squat deeper, locking them out fully, and stand up, pushing your head forward as you do so.  Like most lifts, this isn’t fucking brain surgery, and chance of injury is basically nil due to the use of the rack.
Once you find your groove, however, this movement gets fun, and interesting, in a fucking hurry.  Additionally, I find moving the pins from set to set to add an extra level of difficulty, and makes it a bit more fun on days when you just feel like hammering away on a single exercise all day long.

For me, this exercise arose out of doing ancillary work for the BTN push press.  I had been doing BTN lockouts in the rack, and found that as I got tired and the weight was heavy, I’d start doing what amounted to and OH squat lockout.  These were initially tremendously difficult, but I saw massive crossover for all overhead pressing movements, in addition to extra squat work.  Having made this discovery, I started working on this exercise, specifically, one a week.  Since doing so, I’ve noticed a dramatic increase in my comfort and skill at fully locking out and holding my BTN push presses, and have seen gradual rise in my BTN press overall weights, as well.

Why not just do the full overhead squat?  Frankly, because I don’t see the point.  Clearly, I’m not a grunting, Tapout-ensconced, mouthbreathing retard, but I’m not much of a natural athlete, either.  My balance and flexibility suck, and I’ve always achieved any success in athletics through wild-eyed aggression and general effort, rather than natural skill.  As such, I’m wholly unsuited to something like the OH squat, which is only a hell of an exercise if you’re flexible enough, and have the requisite balance to do it.  As I’ve not neither, and my OH squat weights are so much lower than my front and back squat weights, I’ve never seen the point in doing them.  It’s be like doing one armed bench presses while balancing a spinning teacup on my nose.  Would it be hard?  Hell yes.  Would I ever fucking do it?  Maybe if I were going to consider thinking about doing Hercules curls supersetted with leg extensions and wanted something to occupy my time while doing so.

Should you feel it necessary to attempt full OH squats, have at it.  Personally, I’m going to continue compounding my ridiculous brute strength to no flexibility ratio and leave the full squats to Olympic weightlifters and chicks with awesome asses. 

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