Ionce worked with a coach who easily hit two minutes on a single squat cue. He got into hip-hinge mechanics, named the femur, connected ankle mobility to depth, and stayed enthusiastic the whole way through. I nodded at every part of it, then the client squatted, and it looked identical to the rep before he started talking. I had stopped listening after the first cue, which is exactly what most clients do to you.
Try timing yourself the next time you cue a squat. Start the clock when you open your mouth and stop it when the client starts moving, or count how many words you say before she starts to move. Most coaches have never done this, and the numbers are often uncomfortable.
Your certification taught you what a good squat looks like. It did not teach you how to get one out of a person standing in front of you. And it almost certainly did not teach you that most of the time, the answer is not a better sentence.
The Explanation Problem
Here is what is happening in a client’s head when you explain a movement. She is converting your words into a picture, then converting the picture into a plan, then converting the plan into a body doing something, all while she is under a bar and slightly nervous. That is three translations, and something is lost in every one of them.
Now consider what happens when you put a chair behind her and ask her to sit down. No translation at all. The chair does the coaching, and her body finds the answer before her brain has finished processing the question.
That is the principle underneath everything that follows. Change what she is standing in, standing on, or holding before you change what you are saying. Words come last, and they come one at a time.
Her Knees Cave In
Take the weight off before you say anything, and watch her squat with an empty bar.
If the knees track fine unloaded and collapse the moment you add weight, this is not a cueing problem. It is a load problem, and no amount of clever language will make her strong enough for the weight she is currently under. Take it off, build the strength, come back.
If they cave even with no load, she does not own the position yet, and now you are teaching rather than correcting.
Put a band above her knees and let her push out against it for the whole set. She gets continuous feedback, she can feel the position rather than imagine it, and the reference does not disappear the moment she walks away to check on someone else.
If you are going to speak, do not say “knees out.” That names the outcome without giving her anything to do, and she does not know how to push her knees out any more than she knew how to stop them from caving. Give her the feet instead, because the knee is downstream of the hip and the foot. “Spread the floor apart with your feet” cues external rotation at the hip, and she experiences it as something to do with the ground rather than a correction of her body.
Related: Mobility Is Programming, Not Warm-Up: The Coach’s Protocol for Treating It Like a Training Variable
Her Heels Lift
Put a box or a chair behind her and ask her to sit down and stand up.
The chair tells you what a cue never will. If the heels stay down the moment she has something behind her, the problem was never her ankles. Her body did not trust where it was going, and it was clawing at the floor to keep from falling. That is a pattern-and-confidence problem, and it gets fixed by repeating the sit-and-stand until the pattern belongs to her, then raising the box, and then taking it away.
If the heels still lift with the chair there, now you have real information. That is likely a mobility restriction, and no cue on earth will conjure a range that a joint does not have. Elevate the heels, shorten the range, and put ankle work in the warm-up.
Either way, notice what did not happen. Nobody explained the squat. The environment changed, and her body answered the question.
Her Chest Collapses Forward at the Bottom
Watch her depth before you say a word, because this is usually not a chest problem.
If the torso is fine until a certain point and then folds, she is going deeper than her hips or her ankles currently allow, and her spine is making up the difference. Stop her at the depth she owns. The rounding disappears on its own, and now you have a squat you can load.
If depth is not the issue, watch her breathing. A torso folds because nothing is holding it up, and a client who is not bracing has no structure to resist the load.
Whatever you do, do not say “chest up.” It is the most overused sentence on any gym floor and it creates a client who lifts her sternum, hyperextends her lower back, and flares her ribs toward the ceiling. The squat is not fixed. One fault has been traded for a more expensive one.
What works is bracing the whole system rather than correcting one segment. If you want a tactile cue, place one hand lightly on her upper back and ask her to maintain contact with it throughout the rep. She now has one reference point and one job, which is all any client can manage under load.
One Cue Per Rep
When you do decide to speak, say one thing.
New coaches stack cues because they can see three faults and want to fix all three. So the client hears “knees out, chest up, brace your core, and go a little deeper,” and she now has four jobs and executes none of them. That guarantees a worse rep than the one you were trying to improve.
Pick the fault most likely to hurt her and cue only that one. Everything else waits. Frequently, the other faults resolve on their own once the primary one is fixed, because the body is a system and most compensations are downstream or upstream of a single root problem.
“You are not being paid to be right. You are being paid to change what happens next.”
— What I tell newer coaches more than anything else
Build the Vocabulary Anyway
Every cue in this article will eventually stop working. You will say “spread the floor” so many times that it turns into wallpaper, and your clients will stop hearing it, and you will not notice because you have stopped hearing it too.
So build the vocabulary before you need it. Film your sessions for a week and count how many times you reach for the same phrase. Then take that phrase away from yourself for the next week and find three other ways to deliver the same correction. It will be uncomfortable, and your coaching will get noticeably sharper because you will be forced to look at the movement rather than reach for the sentence you always reach for.
That coach who talked at me for two minutes was not a bad coach. He knew more about the squat than I did at the time. What he had not learned yet was that his job in that moment was never to teach me the squat. It was to change my next rep, and there were four or five things he could have done with the load, the room, or a chair to accomplish it before he ever opened his mouth.
Say less. Watch more. Change the environment first, and save your words for the things a chair cannot fix.
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