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 that matters more than you'd think: what you were holding. The tracker measures your body, not the equipment, so telling it Bodyweight, Goblet, or Barbell (back or front) is how it knows what a good torso angle looks like for your squat — a front squat sits nearly upright at the bottom, a low-bar back squat legitimately leans hard, and grading one by the other's standard helps nobody. 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.