The good-morning is a fine exercise — a loaded bow, hips back, torso tipping toward the floor and returning. The problem is doing one by accident, halfway through what was supposed to be a squat. You hit the bottom in decent shape, start to drive, and instead of rising, your chest dips — torso pitching further forward while the hips climb — until you're performing a good-morning from the hole with squat-day expectations on your back.

It's one of the most common patterns in intermediate squatting, and one of the most worth fixing, because every degree the chest tips forward mid-drive is load sliding off the legs and onto the lower back.

How to spot it on video

Side-on camera, watch the transition from bottom to drive. Three things travel together in a good-morning squat, and CoachVision measures all three from one clip:

  • The torso angle changes the wrong direction. The app compares your trunk angle at the bottom against the early drive. Near zero or negative change means chest and hips rose together. A clearly positive number means the chest dipped first — the pattern's signature, and usually the highest-value fix on the board when it shows.
  • The hips outrun the shoulders. Hip-shoulder sync drops well under 1.0 as the hips take off alone.
  • The balance line drifts. As the chest tips, your shoulder line wanders forward off its starting point over your feet.

Three numbers, one story. Which brings up the important part: don't fix all three. Find the first domino.

The first domino

The chest dip is almost never the chest's idea. Usual suspects, in order:

  • The legs got out-lifted. If the weight is beyond what your quads can drive from the hole, the body tips forward to recruit the hips and back. Honest fix: lighter, until the shape survives the drive. There's no cue that beats physics.
  • The brace leaked. A trunk that loses its pressure mid-rep folds under load that a braced trunk carries easily. If the dip appears only at working weight, breath and bracing work is the medicine.
  • Balance drifted on the way down. Weight sneaking toward the toes during the descent leaves the chest nowhere to go but forward. Watch the descent frames — sometimes the drive's fault was committed three seconds earlier.

And a note on lean itself: a forward torso at the bottom isn't the enemy. Low-bar squats lean a lot by design; that's the style working. The fault is lean that arrives — a torso angle that grows mid-drive rather than being set from the start.

The drill — Wall-Facing Squats

The old-school fix, still unbeaten: squat facing a wall, toes a few inches from it, 2 sets of 8 at bodyweight. The wall makes a forward chest-dip physically impossible — tip and you kiss brick. Your body finds the vertical drive because it's the only drive available: knees out, hips down between the heels, chest proud, shoulder line rising like it's on rails.

Two sets before every squat session for a few weeks, then check your work: film a side-on set and watch the torso-hold number head toward zero while the sync climbs. When the chest stops dipping, something great happens to how squatting feels — the weight stops pinning you forward and starts riding straight down into your legs, where it always belonged. Good-mornings are Tuesday's exercise. Keep them out of your squat.