Ditch the Bar Squat -- Your Back Will Thank You

Paul von Zielbauer
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:06:32 -0700
Lifestyle

I have fond memories of my Friday night squat sessions. The gym was empty but for the true believers. I'd grind through eight sets of ten reps at 225 pounds, sweat-soaked and satisfied, convinced that the barbell back squat was the cornerstone of serious lower-body training. It felt primal. It felt complete. It felt, occasionally, like my spine was being compressed into an accordion.

Turns out, that last sensation was the one worth paying attention to.

After 40-odd years of lifting — and, candidly, the accumulated mileage of seven surgeries — I gave up barbell back squats. Not dramatically, not overnight, but reluctantly, once I finally recorded myself doing them and watched the video back. My left knee wandered inward with each rep like it was trying to leave the room. That's knee valgus — the inward collapse of the knee joint under load — and it's exactly the kind of flaw that, compounded over months and years, sets up the back, SI joint and knee for the sort of chronic, low-grade damage that is genuinely hard to treat and, at first, almost impossible to diagnose.
Updated: Thu Apr 02, 2026

I have fond memories of my Friday night squat sessions. The gym was empty but for the true believers. I'd grind through eight sets of ten reps at 225 pounds, sweat-soaked and satisfied, convinced that the barbell back squat was the cornerstone of serious lower-body training. It felt primal. It felt complete. It felt, occasionally, like my spine was being compressed into an accordion.

Turns out, that last sensation was the one worth paying attention to.

After 40-odd years of lifting — and, candidly, the accumulated mileage of seven surgeries — I gave up barbell back squats. Not dramatically, not overnight, but reluctantly, once I finally recorded myself doing them and watched the video back. My left knee wandered inward with each rep like it was trying to leave the room. That's knee valgus — the inward collapse of the knee joint under load — and it's exactly the kind of flaw that, compounded over months and years, sets up the back, SI joint and knee for the sort of chronic, low-grade damage that is genuinely hard to treat and, at first, almost impossible to diagnose.

I was not, I want to be clear, doing it wrong. My form looked fine, roughly. I've been training since age 12. And yet there it was, on video: irrefutable evidence that my body had been compensating in ways I couldn't feel.

Here's the case against an exercise that generations of coaches, NFL players and powerlifters have called "the king of all exercises."

At loads between 80% and 160% of body weight, the compressive force on the lumbar spine during a barbell squat can reach six to ten times body weight — that's from a study published in 1985, admittedly aged, but never convincingly refuted. The two key discs in the lower spine, L4-L5 and L5-S1, are being compressed and sheared simultaneously while already in a mechanically disadvantaged position. If you've spent decades sitting at a desk, raising children or accumulating the invisible asymmetries that almost all of us carry — one hip lower than the other, one foot turned out, a slightly tilted sacroiliac joint — the barbell squat will find them and exploit them.

That last part is the insidious piece. The SI joint dysfunction that heavy squatting can produce doesn't announce itself with a dramatic injury. It arrives as a nagging ache in the lower back that no amount of stretching or massage fully resolves. Many people don't connect it to squats at all, because the connection is diffuse and delayed. Doctors often misattribute it to lumbar or hip problems. You spend months chasing a diagnosis for something that was, in the end, the direct product of a workout you thought was making you stronger.

After 50, the math gets worse. Hormonal changes — particularly in women post-menopause — reduce the protective buffer that ligaments, tendons and cartilage depend on. Mobility deficits that have been quietly developing for decades become structural. And there is the entirely human temptation, in any gym at any hour, to add weight to the bar because you want to, not because you should.

Mike Boyle, who spent decades as strength and conditioning coach for the Boston Bruins, the U.S. Women's Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Boston Red Sox, has made essentially the same argument. He moved away from bilateral back squats in favor of unilateral work — single-leg movements that train each side of the body independently, which forces the weaker side to function without the stronger side compensating. When you ask who trains the fastest, highest-jumping athletes in the world and what they're doing, Boyle's answer is: single-leg work. Not both feet planted under a loaded bar.

This doesn't mean squat-pattern movements are useless. It means the specific form factor of a heavy barbell on the back of your neck, both feet on the ground, is a high-risk delivery mechanism for something you can achieve more safely in other ways: Bulgarian split squats, trap-bar deadlifts, step-ups, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts. All of them build lower-body strength. None of them loads the lumbar spine from the top down while your hips tilt and one knee quietly drifts left.

If the bar squat is working for you, fine. Go lighter. But if you're over 50 and your lower back has a story to tell — record yourself first. The video may say more than the weight on the bar.