Bar on your back, hips down until the crease passes your knees, stand up. It trains more muscle than anything else in the program and it is in every session of every phase, so learn it first.
Set the bar on the rack at a height that lets you dip slightly under it, not reach up for it. Two real technique families exist inside competitive powerlifting, and neither is wrong: low-bar, with the bar resting across the rear deltoids just below the traps, leans the torso further forward and asks more of the hips and hamstrings. High-bar, sitting higher across the traps, keeps the torso more upright. This program teaches low-bar as the default — the choice Mark Rippetoe and Starting Strength popularized as the standard for raw powerlifting, since it lets most lifters move the most weight with the hips and hamstrings doing the largest share of the work.
That breath-and-brace step is the Valsalva maneuver — see the bracing and Valsalva maneuver page for what it actually does to stabilize your spine, and a real safety caveat worth knowing if you have high blood pressure or a heart condition.
Start the movement at the hips, not the knees — sit your hips back and down rather than dropping straight down. Keep the bar tracking directly over the middle of your foot the whole way. Descend under control to a depth where your hip crease drops at least as low as the top of your knee, then drive up by pushing the floor away, leading with your hips. A well-run squat holds its torso angle through the bottom and most of the drive, straightening only in the last portion of the ascent — not the instant the bar starts moving.
Where the bar sits changes the effective lever length. Low-bar forces more forward lean and more hip-extensor demand — the powerlifting-competition default, since it maximizes the load a lifter can move. High-bar allows a more upright torso and shifts load toward the knees — the weightlifting/CrossFit default, since it mirrors the position needed to receive a clean. A real, direct three-way comparison (Kristiansen, Larsen, Haugen, Helms, and van den Tillaar, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021) had the same fourteen lifters squat low-bar, high-bar, and safety-bar back to back and found real, measured numbers behind both halves of that claim: they lifted the most with low-bar (97.6 kg on average), high-bar came second (93.4 kg), and a safety bar last (91 kg) — and the same lifters showed more hip flexion in low-bar than in either other position at the hardest point of the lift, the sticking region. A separate review pooling the wider research (Glassbrook, Helms, Brown, and Storey, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2017) agrees on the muscle-activity side specifically: low-bar recruits the glutes, hamstrings, and lower-back erectors more, high-bar recruits the quads more. Neither position is a technique error — this program teaches low-bar because it matches its powerlifting orientation, not because high-bar is wrong.
Film a set from the side and from the front at knee height. Compare against these three. Fix the first one you find, then re-film.
Fault: Knees drift toward each other out of the bottom. Hips lose their line of drive.
Fix: Knees stay over the toes the whole way. From the front the shins look like an A, not an X.
Push your knees out at the start of the drive, not the end. Turning the toes out to 30° gives them somewhere to go — and the research on this fault is genuinely mixed, so treat cueing it away as good practice, not a fix for a proven weakness.
Cue: “knees out”
Fault: Out of the bottom the hips rise first and the torso tips toward horizontal. The bar moves forward of mid-foot.
Fix: Hips and shoulders rise together. The torso angle at the bottom is the torso angle halfway up.
Drive your upper back into the bar as you stand. Usually a sign your quads or upper-back tightness gave out before the lift finished — if it keeps happening at every weight, take 10% off.
Cue: “chest up, bar back”
Fault: The hip crease stops above the knee. Half the range, and the reps do not count in the program.
Fix: Hip crease below the top of the knee. The dashed line is the knee; the dot is the hip.
Stance and knees-out are usually the cause, not flexibility. Widen the heels a little, point the toes out more, sit between the knees rather than over them.
Cue: “hips between the knees”
Fixed the stance and it's still not there? A genuine ankle or hip range-of-motion limit is the real remaining possibility — see mobility work for squat depth for what actually limits it, why, and the real drills for each.
Squat inside a rack with the safety pins set just below where the bar is at your bottom position. If you cannot stand up, sit down and let the pins take it — you walk out from under the bar. If you miss a rep, the bail technique is pushing the bar backward off your shoulders while driving your body forward, so it drops onto the pins behind you rather than on top of you. Worth practicing once with an empty bar so the motion is not unfamiliar the one time you actually need it.
The squat is the first lift in both Day A and Day B and takes the largest jump after the deadlift. It usually stalls last, so it is the lift most likely to still be climbing when you move to intermediate. Squat and deadlift both train every session in novice by design — a deliberate choice for frequency over the "once a week" pattern some programming favors, because practicing the pattern matters more than the extra recovery time would this early on.
Squat by phase: novice adds 5 lb (2.5 kg) most sessions; intermediate adds 5 lb (2.5 kg) on Test Day; advanced trains it as a percentage of a training max in five-week blocks. Miss reps two sessions running and it resets to 90% of its last completed weight.