Steps
- Stand up straight while holding a barbell behind you at arms length and your feet at shoulder width. Tip: A shoulder width grip is best with the palms of your hands facing back. You can use wrist wraps for this exercise for a better grip. This will be your starting position.
- While keeping your head and eyes up and back straight, squat until your upper thighs are parallel to the floor. Breathe in as you slowly go down.
- Pressing mainly with the heel of the foot and squeezing the thighs, go back up as you breathe out.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the barbell hack squat to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.