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Are you using the squat to maximize quad development? Glute development? Or are you just wanting to move more weight to increase your numbers? Knowing the answer should impact your training differently.

Here's the deal: Just because a muscle is active in a movement doesn't mean it's being asked to create significant tension in the movement. And if a movement doesn't cause a particular muscle group to have high amounts of tension involved in it, then the growth response in that area is going to be minimal.

Some say you need to do a deep squat to get the quads to grow and that the quads become more activated in a deep squat. Technically, this is true, especially for the vastus medialis (the tear drop muscle around the knee). But there's a difference in a muscle becoming activated in a movement and it having a great deal of tension on it.

Let's say you have a dimmer switch on your lights. If the lights are off, obviously they aren't active. If you turn the dimmer switch "on" but just barely move the knob, the lights are now "active," however they're very dim and give off very little light. If you turn the knob on all the way, the lights illuminate maximally.

When you do a full squat, the knee extensors do become more active. However, if the joint that's the furthest away from the applying force are the hips, then the knee extensors won't generate very much tension during the movement. Are they active? Yes. Are they creating a lot of tension? No.

So squat depth is irrelevant to quad development if the knee extensors aren't being asked to generate the greatest amount of tension in the movement. If the knees don't have a significant degree of flexion in the squat on the descent –they don't come very far forward – then the hip extensors will end up bearing the brunt of the work. And to come full circle, this happens when someone sits back too far in a squat.

You can squat well above parallel and the quads may have an enormous amount of tension on them because of a greater degree of knee flexion and extension. Or you can squat below parallel and they end up with very little tension because there's a greater degree of hip flexion and extension than at the knee. This isn't conjecture. It's physics. It's all relative to the distance between the applying force and the joint working against it.

So if your initial movement in the squat is to hinge at the hips, meaning you sit back, then how far you sit back is going to end up determining what area in the lower body ends up doing the most work. Depth becomes irrelevant at this point unless you're just squatting two inches down. Then you're not really working anything except your ego.

Mechanically, if you're trying to move as much weight as possible, then you want to play to your strengths, or divide the tension evenly between the hip and knee joints. If your goal is to move as much weight as possible and you're very quad dominant, then squatting with more knee flexion and extension is ideal. If you've got a big ass and strong adductors, then squatting with more hip flexion and extension is ideal. In either case, the path of the bar is still relevant and doesn't change. It should still be over the mid-foot position.

So what you do with your hips and knees will play a far bigger role in what creates the greatest amount of tension, muscular wise, when you squat. After that, depth plays a part in overall quad activation. But again, there's a difference in activation and maximal tension.

And lastly, depending on your goals and leverages, it's possible the squat may not even be a great movement for you. If you have long femurs and get very bent over in a squat regardless of what you do, then finding other movements to build your quads is probably going to be a much better solution. As good of a movement as the squat is, it has its shortcomings for some due to genetic leverage disadvantages. If you complete in powerlifting, then figuring out how to play to your strengths from a mechanical position will be vitally important.