Most squat form-check footage can't answer the questions it was filmed to ask. Shot from a three-quarter diagonal, cropped at the shins, phone leaned against a dumbbell at ankle height — the clip hides depth, distorts the back angle, and turns every reviewer, human or AI, into a guesser. The fix costs five minutes and nothing else. Here's the setup.

Two angles, two different stories

The squat is unusual: it needs both cameras eventually, because each one sees what the other physically can't.

Side-on is the default. Depth, torso angle, whether your chest and hips rise together, how far your balance line drifts, how controlled the descent is — all of it lives in the side view. If you film one clip, film this one.

Front-on has one job, and it's a big one. Knee tracking. Whether your knees hold their lane over your toes on the way up, or cave inward — that's invisible from the side and obvious from the front, along with your stance width. Alternate: side view this session, front view the next.

Neither view is optional forever. A squat that looks immaculate from the side can be caving from the front, and vice versa.

The checklist

  • Phone at hip height, 8 to 12 feet away. Hip height keeps the geometry honest. A phone on the floor angled upward compresses depth and exaggerates lean — the two things you most want read correctly. A bench, a box, or a cheap tripod solves it.
  • Whole body in frame, head to feet, for the entire rep. Crop the feet and nobody can see your base; crop the head and the torso story is incomplete. Landscape helps.
  • Steady camera. Propped or mounted. Never handheld by a friend doing their best.
  • One to three reps per clip, under fifteen seconds. Start recording a beat before the first rep and stop a beat after the last, so every rep gets counted whole.
  • Contrast with the background. Dark clothes against a dark garage wall make joints hard to track — for AI review especially, but for human eyes too.

What to do with the footage

Watch it yourself first — you'll catch more than you expect. Freeze the bottom: where is your hip crease relative to your knee, and is your chest still proud? Scrub the first moment of the drive up: did hips and shoulders leave together, or did the hips win the race? Check the descent: controlled ride down, or a free-fall into a bounce?

Then get a measured second opinion. This exact setup — side or front, hip height, whole body, one to three reps — is precisely what CoachVision is built to read. One thing it will ask: what you were holding. The tracker measures your body, not the equipment, so telling it Bodyweight, Goblet, or Barbell (back or front) is how the coach knows which squat to write about. Know its limit, though — the torso-angle band itself is one set of numbers for every variant. A front squat sits nearly upright at the bottom and a low-bar back squat legitimately leans hard, and both get measured against the same band, so if you're low-bar, expect a lean the number calls large and judge it as your style rather than a fault. From there it returns measured checkpoints — depth, knee bend, torso hold, hip-shoulder sync, balance line, tempo — real numbers from body tracking, not a vibe.

One habit turns all of this from a snapshot into progress: same angle, same distance, once a week. A consistent camera is the quiet superpower — week over week, you can watch a fault actually shrink instead of arguing with your memory about it.