Kettlebell Squat Form

Let's go over kettlebell squats. So I'm going to go over just three different variations real quick, right? Here's the thing though, don't overthink this. This is super simple, okay? It's really hard to mess up the kettlebell squat, but there are just a few things to keep in mind. So what we're doing to do the kettlebell squat, the first variation, we're going to do a rack squat, right? So we clean the kettlebell up like we just learned in that how-to, and then we're in the racked position now, okay?

Whenever we're in the racked position, which is when we're squatting, when we're doing thrusters, when we're doing presses, which we're going to learn as well, this is the position we're in, okay? So what's crucial about this position is first of all, make it comfortable for yourself. What feels comfortable, okay? Everyone's a little bit different. So you want to feel comfortable. That's important too. But some key things is keep your elbow pointing forward.

A lot of people tend to do this sort of thing when they first rack the kettlebell. So you're keeping the elbow pointing forward. That way you rest the weight of the kettlebell kind of on your body, right? You can then kind of rest this elbow almost on your core like this. And it's almost like you got a small child you're holding, boom, right? And you can lean your hips to the side and this becomes like a shelf right here where you could chill all day versus holding it out here or something like that where you put a lot of stress on just the shoulder joint.

This way your whole body is involved, right? So this is the rack position. Now, what's important here, when we're in this rack position, we don't need to stay so tight here as we squat. You're going to hear that from a lot of kettlebell people that you need to stay like this as you squat. Nonsense. You don't need to do that. Okay. What you want to do is move in a way that allows you to keep good posture as you squat.

So when we squat, and this is squatting in general, right? Squatting 101 right here is as we squat, we want to flex our back, right? Like we're an Instagram girl taking a picture. But seriously, you want to flex your back, brace the back muscles, right? All of them, your lower back, your mid back, your upper back, brace them. It doesn't need to be so tight. Just slightly brace and engage them, right?

And then that's it. As you squat, all you want to focus on is keeping your knees in line with your toes. Don't worry too much about where your toes are pointing. Just put your toes in a direction that feels comfortable for your knees, right? Keep your knees in line with your toes, and then keep that posture, keep that activation throughout your back. That's it. And finally, last thing is only squat as low as you can maintain those things, right?

So as soon as you feel like your legs are caving in, or your knees are bowing out or whatever your knees are tracking off of your feet, or you're starting to lose that, that the flexed muscles in your back, ironically, it's called extension through your spine. But it sounds you would think it's called flexion, but not to confuse you. As soon as you lose that curvature in your back from your muscles being activated in your back, once you feel like you have to cave forward, or you're losing that posture, you're going too low, right?

So limit your range to stay in a range where you can keep your knees in line with your toes, and you can keep your posture upright. And also keep your heels planted on the floor, of course, okay, don't let your heels come off the floor and rock forward like that. Okay, keep those heels planted. So heels planted, knees in line with toes flexed back, and only squat as low as you can maintain all three of those things, right?

And then when we add the kettlebell, we're in the rack position here. So as I squat, it's okay for this kettlebell to come up like this, to help me maintain my posture, right? To help me maintain any three of those things, we just went over, right? So that's totally fine. And then that's the rack squat, as simple as that, you rack the kettlebell and you squat like I just showed you. And then there's the goblet squat, we clean it up, bottoms down like this.

And same thing, squat, keeping those three things in mind we talked about. And then final variation, bottoms up, just like that. Very simple. So don't overthink it. Hope this helps. Peace.