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press, and the idea of pushing the floor with the feet provides an inadequate signal for the hamstrings, adductors, and glutes to provide their power out of the bottom. Hip extension is the first part of the upward drive out of the bottom. When you think about raising your butt up out of the bottom, the nervous system has a simple, efficient way to fire the correct motor units to initiate hip drive.
    Eye gaze direction plays an important part in this process of driving the hips, and it is introduced even before the bar becomes part of the squat. Looking up at the ceiling when squatting has so many detrimental effects on proper technique that it is absolutely amazing that so many people still advise their lifters to do it. It interferes with the correct bottom position, with hip drive out of the bottom, and with correct chest position. It changes the focal point from a close, manageable spot to one that is farther away. And the neck position that results from looking at the ceiling is inherently unsafe: to place the cervical spine in extreme overextension and then to place a heavy weight on the trapezius muscles directly underneath it is, at best, imprudent. The normal anatomical position for the cervical spine is the preferred position when the weights get heavy.
    The habit of looking up is also a very difficult problem to correct if it has existed for any length of time. Lifters whose high school football coaches taught them to look up during the squat often have a very difficult time with changing the eye gaze direction, even when we have effectively demonstrated that looking down works so much better. An embedded movement pattern is always easier to perform than a new one, and it will be the default movement pattern if conscious control is shifted to another aspect of the new technique.
    Do an experiment or two to demonstrate for yourself the effect of gaze direction. Assume the bottom position with knees out, toes out, and heels down. Put your chin down slightly and look at a point on the floor 4 or 5 feet in front of you. Now drive your hips up out of the bottom, and take note of how this feels. Now do the same thing while looking at the ceiling. If you have a training partner or coach, get in the bottom position and have him block your hips, with a hand placed firmly on your lower back and pushing straight down, so that you have something to push up on, but not so that he pushes you forward. Push up against the resistance while looking down at your floor focus point, and note the effectiveness of your hip drive and the power it produces. Then try this movement again while looking up. You will discover an amazing thing – that the chin-down (looking down keeps the chin down), eyes-down position enables your hip drive to function almost automatically. In contrast, the upward eye gaze pulls the chest forward, the knees forward, and the hips forward – just a little, but enough to produce a profound effect. It slacks the hamstrings and all the posterior muscles we are trying to keep tight so that we can use them to drive the hips up. The first time you do this experiment will convince you that looking down is more efficient.

    Figure 2-15. Blocking the hips to learn the effect of eye gaze direction. An upward-directed gaze quite effectively diminishes the ability to use the posterior chain during the drive up from the bottom.

    Looking at the floor also provides the eyes with a fixed position reference. Using this reference, you can easily identify any deviation from the correct movement pattern and adjust it as it happens. The ceiling also provides a reference, but the neck position is unsafe, and anything you’re looking at upward will be farther away than the floor when you’re at the bottom of the squat. It’s hard to imagine a room in which the floor isn’t closer to the eyes than the ceiling is; the floor is therefore more useful as a reference – smaller movements can be detected against the closer point.
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