[wdewind]

Yeah, I meant barbell squats. Dan Riley's school of thought is extremely 1980s/1990s and does not reflect the "state of the art" in terms of strength training. He advocates using machine based squats, which greatly decrease the training usefulness of the movements. This is because they both isolate the movement to one plane, and limit the number of muscles involved in the movement. A linebacker hitting another linebacker is essentially a back squat, and in real life this happens in multiple planes and with all of your muscles. There is no advantage to using a machine, and many disadvantages.

In one piece[1] Dan says things like "To minimize shearing forces on the knee, we ask our players to keep the knees over the ankles in the squatting position."

This demonstrates (along with many other idiotic things he says in that piece) a relatively massive misunderstanding of biomechanics and is kind of disgraceful to hear coming from someone who is a strength coach for people paid millions of dollars a year.

http://assets.houstontexans.com/assets/fanzone/installment48...