Boston Barbell, 28B Nashua Road, Billerica, MA (2026)

We train to move better and get stronger—aesthetics follow. Performance First. Aesthetics Follow

08/28/2026

The Anderson squat starts at the scene of the crime. Where your squat went off the rails and ended up a Good Morning.

And that’s because it removes a lot of the stored energy and elasticity you’re depending on from your traditional squat work. A normal squat lets you descend, reverse, and reuse stored energy. The amortization phase recycles downward force into your ascent, and for a lot of lifters, this ends up a fairly passive reversal with dramatic loss of position.

Strip the benefits of stored eccentric load away and the pattern changes completely.

Since the Anderson Squat starts dead on the pins around your sticking point, there’s no stretch reflex. No stored eccentric force. No running start. You manufacture upward force from absolutely nothing. You’ll have to set up with the tightness of the deadlift, because the demand is identical: pre-tension before the drive, brace hard against the bar, and any slack in the trunk or setup gets punished the moment you try to explode off the pins.

Now there are a lot of squat variations to theoretically address this issue of “Tipping” in the squat. Eccentric Squats to perfect the downward path, Paused Squats to build control in the hole—all valid, but all still dependent on the eccentric force you gathered on the way down.

And so it will be some intelligent blend of these strategies we employ to help remedy what plagued almost all squats. These will help us perfect the skill of squatting.

And while you may not think of this as an “S” Tier Squat Variation, It’s the one that will help you get an “S” Tier Back Squat.

08/09/2026

Forward shin, neutral shin - none of it decides whether the glutes work or not. What decides the level of glute recruitment is whether we use our hips correctly to control and drive hip extension on the ascent.

About 10-12 years ago, I became very focused on the idea of a deliberate, “elevator” ascent in the squat, from listening to Max Aita | Weightlifting Coach and the Juggernaut Podcast. They would talk about resisting the backward tracking off the knee out of the hole. And it seemed obvious that this was the central patterning problem I saw across powerlifting and aesthetic training. People would start in deliberate positions, and then collapse into accidental ones. And the forward trunk cave, the loss of lumbopelvic stability, the delayed hip extension—these were so ingrained in lifters by the time they came to me that I would spend months to years slowly coaching it out of them.

And so I began building a system around this idea. Back then, I worked at Lifetime, and coaches would say people were doing “Cmar Squats” — a barbell back squat in which we tried to delay knee extension and overemphasize early hip extension, explosively.

Two things started to happen.

1. people got very strong, very quickly.
2. somewhat to my surprise, people got very big glutes.

I had prescribed these squats for patterning and general leg strength. The glute growth was disproportionate.

The first lesson for the modern glute training world: a forward-knee, knee-dominant exercise like a squat can absolutely grow glutes.

In the above drill, you can see me lock the knee joint in place against the bench. With the shin angle locked, the only way the body travels up is through Hip Drive.

This takes away practicing our way out of a stripper squat under a heavy barbell. The patterning change is isolated by constraint rather than by cue. Keep the knees pinned at the bench and that escape route closes.

A bunch of squat World Records and USAPL National Championships later, the proof is in the pudding. A long-term commitment to deliberate hip use in the squat is fundamental for getting your squats as strong as possible. Don’t be surprised if that leads to even bigger muscles.I’m

08/02/2026

Coaching is about finding the cue that makes the rep click.

That’s why we say the hip thrust is in your hands.

A simple change in how you use your hands can completely change how your body locks in. And when your body locks in, the glutes do more of the work.

Your glutes are part of your core, so the hip thrust is a core exercise. The problem is that the lever between your upper back and the bar gives your spine dozens of opportunities to compensate instead of your glutes.

So we build the brace with the hands. Just like pulling on the bar in a squat turns on your lats and abs, pushing the bar into your hips helps turn on your abs during the hip thrust.

When the abs turn on, the glutes usually follow. That brace keeps your pelvis stacked so the movement stays a hinge instead of turning into a spinal whip.

The technique is simple. Before you descend, push into the bar. Keep pushing the whole way down and the whole way up. Done.

Apply this tip on your next hip thrust set and feel the difference on rep one.

07/29/2026

Squats and RDLs load the glutes at their deepest stretch. Hip thrusts hammer them at full squeeze. The 45-degree extension trains the middle.

In all training, we manipulate angles, force vectors and peak moment arms to change the way a muscle experiences mechanical tension. All with the goal to ultimately grow more muscle.

The 45° is one smart, targeted at we do that with glute training.

Here is the setup. Hinge over the pad and let your torso hang all the way down. Sink to the bottom of your range and give up the tension for a beat. That is your start.

Now the work. Do not lift your torso. Squeeze your glutes and tuck your tailbone under, hard. Posterior pelvic tilt is the movement, not spinal extension. If you arch your low back to feel taller, you have handed the rep to your erectors and let the glute off the hook.

Tuck, squeeze, and stay there a second. The rep finishes when the tail is fully tucked and the glute is locked short, not when your chest is high.

Why bother? All glute exercises do not train these muscles the same way. When we find an exercise that generates a meaningful peak squeeze while also substsntially stressing the stretch component, we’re interested. When we realize it allows us to nearly erase all exposure to spinal load: we’re sold.

07/27/2026

The single-arm dumbbell row has been replaced.

Most single-arm rows leak. You brace against a bench with the off-hand, your torso hunts for leverage, your hinge collapses, your back rounds and the set quietly turns into a whole-body heave to move the weight. The lift still “works” — but the cost is the exact thing you were trying to train through it: honest tension on the back and a trunk that has to hold position under load.

The quadruped dumbbell row seals that leak.

Set up in a tabletop position. Lock the abs first, then get on all fours across two points of elevation — two blocks, two benches, two boxes. Any gym has them. That elevation gives the dumbbell room to *reach past the floor,* so you’re rowing through full range instead of stopping short.

The rowing mechanics don’t change. Wrap the arm around the body and drive the elbow back toward your side pocket. Reach all the way to the ground at the bottom to milk the stretch, then row back under control. Same row you already know how to do.

So now we have a position that allows us to hit our back harder. But this variation doesn’t just change how hard we hit our back: it massively changes the demand on the trunk. On all fours with one hand off the ground, the load wants to rotate you. Your abs and obliques have to fight that rotation on every rep to keep the torso square. That’s the anti-rotation work baked into the movement — you don’t actively seek it, the position forces it.

So you train back and core at the same time, and neither one robs the other. The core work doesn’t cap how much you can row, and the row doesn’t turn the core work into an afterthought.

Once you try this row you’ll see why it’s the clear improvement over the traditional dumbbell row.

07/25/2026

Most kickbacks live and die on the squeeze.

You extend, you clench at the top, you feel the glute fire for a fraction of a second — and you call that the rep. The deficit kickback throws that logic out.

Here’s the mechanism. Instead of performing a kickback standing with a cable or on all-fours in traditional Quadruped, we come down on our forearms up and up with our knee. That drops you into much deeper hip flexion, where peak load lands at a deeper moment than you’ll ever hit squeezing at the top of a cable kickback.

I really like this done slowly. No momentum and no swinging. No arching to cheat height. First I hold the position until I feel my glutes. I then extend my bent-knee up slowly, then lower all the way down, controlled in both directions.

Don’t let “bodyweight” fool you. Done honestly this is not just an at-home option, but a fantastic gym option. Remember, it’s the deeper range and cleaner mechanics doing the work here, not just the load.

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Billerica, MA
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