Excellent post. Are you a fan of high bar for athletes because it translates better to the "athletic readiness" position of an outfielder or linebacker with hands on knees (I don't know the name of that stance)? Would love a little more explanation of high bar vs. low bar in that regard. Thanks.
How much time do you have? lol
There are literally PhD dissertations on this topic.
The issue isn't necessarily just high bar vs. low bar squatting, but more: what is optimal for recruiting high threshold motor units? Think about a motor unit as the motor neuron and all of the muscle fibers that the motor neuron innervates. When you recruit motor neurons, say, by lifting a grocery bag, there's a "tug of war" system where slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant muscles are recruited to lift that resistance directly in proportion to how much resistance there is. Once that resistance gets heavier and heavier, more and more motor neurons will be recruited to try and lift the bag. High threshold motor units recruit type II, "fast-twitch" muscle fibers which we know are responsible for speed, which is obviously what we want to recruit more of and more often to make our players faster.
The powerlifter / low bar squatter mindset is that all that matters for recruiting high threshold motor units is load. Lift the heaviest weight you can, which will recruit the most motor units, and will therefore make athletes stronger, which in turn makes them faster. ****, I've seen that same thing repeated here on this board.
The issue is that while it is true that high resistance / load recruits high threshold motor units, it's still suboptimal to
specificity. A heavy low bar back squat is an incredibly inefficient, inapplicable movement in football. However, it's biomechanically advantageous to a high bar squat because it involves more hip flexion into extension, so you can lift more weight low bar squatting than you can high bar squatting.
But high bar squatting is the basis for athletic movement. No fast athlete is ever getting into a low bar squat position during an event, and if they are, they suck. The high bar back squat is also the biomechanical basis for the Olympic lifts, which we employ to recruit those same high threshold motor units in the hips, which again: make athletes faster.
In other words: if you want to train to lift the most amount of weight, low bar squat. If you want to train to actually be an athlete, high bar squat.
The only downside of high bar squatting is that because it emphasizes knee extension over hip extension, you can potentially get an imbalance where the quads become way stronger than the glutes / hamstrings, potentially leading to injury. So it's imperative that high bar athletes do a lot of hamstring work, particularly knee flexion hamstring work (leg curls, nordic hamstring curls, etc.) in order to maintain strong knee stability.
