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Wellness Wednesday for March 29, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What you want is specifically for your center of mass to stay balanced above the mid foot. This is not the same as having the barbell directly over the mid foot, although as the weight of the barbell becomes large compared to your bodyweight then that becomes a better and better approximation. Since you're just using a broomstick you will have to lean forwards to counterweight your hips moving backwards.

Do you still feel balanced over a constant spot on the mid foot even as you "smooch the wall"?

What you want is specifically for your center of mass to stay balanced above the mid foot.

Ah, that makes sense. But if my own weight is balanced above the mid foot when I squat bodyweight and the barbell is balanced above the mid foot when I put it on my traps, why should our centers of mass diverge? If anything, as the barbell gets heavier and I lean forward to squat, I should be using my hips more and more as a counterweight.

UPD: I played around with http://mysquatmechanics.com/ and I think I got it. Poor ankle flexion forces your squat to be hip-heavy, causing you to lean. The better the flexion, the more you can share the load between your quads and your hips. So it's either my ankles are too stiff (easy to check), or my quads are too weak.