Strength and deconditioning 4: Squat workout heaven

I think I had the most perfect squat workout in history, yesterday. Instead of my usual 5 sets of 3, which leads to a pretty decent fifteen reps at giant weight, I chose to do 4 sets of 6 on back squat and 4 sets of 6 on cross arm front squat. All the back squats were done with Olympic protocol: high bar, narrow stance, straight drop from the knees and a super deep bottom, ass to grass, as they say. This is what Marty Gallagher calls the "perfect squat." The front squats were done with the bar high on my front deltoids and clavicle, almost high enough to choke me but not quite, and I paused at the bottom for one second before coming up. Back squats were 315, 355, 405 and 425. Front squats were 205, 255, 275 and 315. I honestly felt like my thighs were going to fail on the last set of each one, especially the front squats, which are a monstrous strain on the quadriceps anyway.

Although some people don't seem to like them--my last weightlifting coach, who was a great coach by the way, among them--squats are absolutely my favorite exercise. I can move a massive amount of weight, and nothing stimulates strength and muscular growth like pushing huge weight. Stimulation of the quadriceps and posterior chain also promote the release of testosterone, and this causes all of your other exercises, from bench press to clean and jerk, to be more effective. By doing squats (and dead lifts) along with other big, full body and multiple joint movements, you can't help but get big, thick and strong! Yet another reason to avoid those lat pull downs and cheat curls that the kid in the Ed Hardy shirt and backwards cap is doing... over there in my thrice damned squat rack, of course. For one thing, he's not getting the most bang out of his buck by stimulating the most muscle fibers--even if he was doing squats, which he's not--and secondly, he looks like an absolute, total and complete tool shed, and you really don't want to be anything like him, right? Even if he does score with rather skanky blond bartenders by pretending to be an MMA warrior that fights in a cage because of a vaguely homoerotic weekend he and his "brosephs" once had. There's an old Russian proverb, which I read first through Pavel Tsatsouline, which goes, "Feed the wolf!" Your legs are the wolf. Feed them and the whole body will grow.