The B-Squat

[Gareth83]

I'm not sure if many of you remember but there was an excellent article over at T-Nation regarding the 'Third World Squat':
T-Nation.com | Third-World Squat




anyway I stumbled across an excellent article entitled 'Posture, Functional Training and the B-Squat....':
Conditioning Research: Posture, Functional Training and the B Squat....

The blogger has emailed Esther Gokhale - author of Amazon.com: 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain in the Back, Neck, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Foot (Remember When It Didn't Hurt): Esther Gokhale, Susan Adams: Books asking her why she doesn't rate the Third World Squat / Asian Squat.

her response:

Quote

Here are my musings on squatting.

1. At birth, many of our joints (including the ankles, knees and hips) are not ossified. Instead of bone, we have cartilage in those areas.

2. Each of the above joints has a timetable for when the cartilage ossifies. The hip joint, for example, is made of three parts - the ischeum, ileum and pubis - each pair of which ossifies at a different age (first pair at age 2; last pair at age 16).

3. Once your joints have ossified, they are relatively immutable. Bone does change shape depending on the stresses on it, but it does not change drastically and in particular, the above ossifications are irreversible.

4. If you grow up squatting (on pit toilets, eating on the floor, etc) then the joints ossify differently than if you grew up sitting on chairs and using commodes for toilets. In particular, if you grew up squatting, your joints will ossify in a way that allow you to continue to squat in adulthood. If you did not squat through the years that your ankles, knees, and hips were ossifying, you will probably not be able to do a healthy full squat in adulthood.

5. People who force squats without having he joint architecture to do them tend to round their backs (compressing their spinal discs), pronate their ankles, and stress their knees.

6. Recommendation: don't try to force a squat. In most situations you can do the job equally well with a modified squat (on foot flat on the floor, the other on the ball of the foot). The times squatting does help are childbirth and evacuating your bowels. In these situations I recommend using some extra support under your heels - this makes squatting easy on the ankles and back. For other situations like certain squatting Yoga poses, I recommend not going all the way into the pose.

He then goes on to recommend the B-Squat:
The B-Squat - Read this!!!!




I'm thinking about giving this a go.

What do others think on the B-Squat? My aim isn't to compete in a power lifting event so I think this is an excellent idea....

[dope540]

If it works for you then it's all cool.kids and babies do the third world squat, oly lifters do it, you also go atg when you do pistols. Haven't heard of many complaints from these people.

[Was_once_fat_dave]

Sounds like it's plausible but then how do you trust someone who wears those sunglasses!!!

[AlexTemper]

Looks like a slight variation of a Split Squat to me.

[hailtotheking]

Yeah its just a deep, short-stride split squat.