The Overhead Squat – The Benefits of This Extraordinary Lift!

If you don’t know what an overhead squat is then you need to learn how to execute this lift flawlessly. This particular exercise poses many benefits to your overall fitness and strength program. The overhead squat is an exercise, like any other, that has many variations. For this article I’m going to discuss the overhead barbell squat.

To begin, if you have never seen this particular lift executed it requires a decent amount of upper-body and lower-body strength and a reasonable amount of shoulder and hip flexor flexibility. The great thing is that even practicing to do this lift one can promote all of these variables in their personal program. To complete the lift one presses the barbell overhead with the arms locked out. With the bar overhead you then squat to at least parallel depth with the load overhead. Now this sounds easy, but be warned that you will find out that your shoulders must have enough flexibility and range of motion in order to keep the bar straight overhead otherwise it will drift forward pulling you in that direction. You can gain tremendous shoulder flexibility and stability from the overhead barbell squat lift. It is also a great precursor as a warm up for the traditional barbell back squats. You will also find that it can help you to develop a powerful upper back and a substantial amount of core strength therefore increasing your power in many other lifts. If you want to start to practice get the motion down by using a simple broom handle before moving on to the weighted bar.

This is a great strength training squat to develop tremendous upper-body stability and flexibility. This is a great exercise to add to your personal fitness program to beat the results out of you!