I think the thing i ' m focusing on that you are not focusing on is that the bar is still on him even after it leaves his left shoulder . Once the bar falls off the left side , his right shoulder is now holding that end of the bar up . Thats a huge problem when holding this kind of weight it can be controlled in a very specific range of motion with the spine and legs perfectly balanced to carry the load evenly above your center of gravity . If this gets tweaked left or right or front or back even a tiny bit , it canbe catastrophic . The crazy twist this guy ends up doing while one side of the bar is still on him and the other is not is like asking for permanent damage . Also , as someone who does squats like this not quite this weight and has been coached a little , you actually do want to be as close to the uprights as possible . Every step back you take when unrackong the bar beyond like two inches is unnecessary , puts you under tension longer , and basically allows you to fuck something up . Stepping forwardbackward like that should be almost completely eliminated . What makes this even weirder is this guy ' s size says he clearly has lifted some weights pretty seriously for several years , so its strange that he makes such a stupid move . Nobody up and puts 400 lbs on the bar on day three or four , it normally takes starting small and inching your way up to that weight , during which time he would learn all the stuff I mentioned about minimizing movment while the bar is on you . The typical lifter who squats this much would probably keep the bar no more than a few inches from the uprights during the entirety of his squat . You ' d also expect him to have learned to bail on a failed lift properly , not this singlearm rollout thing he tries to do . Which , incidentally , should still only takes as much backward travel as the length of those spotter arms . That ' s why theyre the length they are because anyone doing things remotely within the normal range for the exercise he ' s doing should be able to bail and have those bars catch the weight . So while I can ' t tell definitively when and where the bar may have hit the arms based on his position and how absurdly low they are , even if he was as far forward as he should have been , I can say for sure that if he was in the approproate position , the spotter arm would have reduced some of the time he was under the weight of the bar , which in this case is the biggest priority .