Feet close, or feet wide.
Toes in or toes out.
What is the best squatting position for you?
I'm going to show you today.
That can only be answered by you and your own femur.
What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Today we're going to talk about what the right squatting position is for you.
And as I said, it's going to be determined, guys, not by one person telling you what that
right squat position is for you.
It's by you knowing and feeling what that right squat position is for you because your
femur tells you what that answer is.
What do I mean by that?
Guys, we've heard that we should have our feet out wide, right, at least shoulder-width
or further.
Or we've heard that our feet should be very narrow when we squat, right.
Or we can be told that we should have our toes pointed in or our toes pointed out.
Which is the right answer?
Guys, it comes down to our bone structure.
The bone structure can be different from person to person.
We see that the neck and the head of this ball and socket joint can either be longer
or shorter.
And some people, the neck of the femur can be extended by even another inch or two inches.
So, if you look at how that sits here, guys, if we look, the normal femur would sit in
here like that.
The one with the longer neck on the femur is going to have to sit further away from
the pelvis, right, because it's got to fit inside that joint and it's already an extra
2 inches.
That, can you imagine what that would do if guys were telling this guy he had to squat
narrow.
His leg is comfortably wider and further apart, but you tell this guy to squat narrow, he's
gonna' have issues.
He's gonna' have some pain in his hips and most likely his knees because of torque.
On the contrary, some people can have shorter necks of the femur here.
So, again, it can fit in really nice and snug, and you're telling this guy that he's got
to squat wide.
So now his hip is angled in.
There's like, a lot of stress, value stress, right here on the inside of his knee that
would cause some problems for the guy.
So, if you're somebody that squats wide and feels pain on the inside of your knee, it
could be that you've got this issue going on.
The next thing we could have here is something going on with the direction of the head and
the neck here of the femur.
It doesn't have to be the length of it, but it could be-what angle is it pointing at?
It doesn't always, guys, point right down the barrel of the femur.
Sometimes it points a little bit forward which would be an anti-version, and sometimes it
points a little bit backwards, which is a retro-version, alright.
If you look at what would happen if you had an anti-verted head of your femur, in order
to sit into this socket here,
if it's angling this way, then we have to meet it, right, we have to push the bone in
place to get it to fit inside the acetabulum there of the hip.
But what does that do to the toe?
Right?
It internally rotates your entire leg.
So, for a guy that's told here, he's got to squat toes out, no chance.
No chance.
This guy is never going to be able to squat comfortably toes out.
What he's going to be able to do at best, and what we're going to need him to do, is
try to get his knees and his toes at least pointing straight ahead, ok.
So, he's going to have to work on his flexibility to make sure that that can happen.
On the contrary, the guy that's got the retro-verted femur here, again, if it's pointing backwards,
then we're going to have to have our femur sit into the socket like this.
Now his toes are pointed out.
He's going to very comfortably be able to do those wider, toes out squats because it
fits perfectly with his anatomy.
Alright, so the idea here is, guys, there are some things you can't change, alright.
We talked about genetics, and I think that there's a large part of your genetics that
you can overcome with proper training, but you can't change your bone structure.
You certainly can't change your hip unless you're going in for a hip replacement.
We're not looking to have you guys do that.
So, you have to learn your own body, and then train within those guidelines.
And what we try to do here at ATHLEANX as a physical therapist is to at least educate
and enlighten you guys that these things do exist, ok.
So the 'one size fits all' people making these recommendations of you have to squat wide
and you have to squat toes out.
Guys, that's kind of misleading, alright.
So, I want to give you guys, and put that science back in strength to allow you guys
to learn the best workouts for you and then provide you guys with the best workout program.
That, my friends, is over at ATHLEANX.COM.
You can head over there and join me on Team ATHLEAN.
Let me be, not just your coach, but a physical therapist as well and kind of teach you guys
how to put that science back in strength, as I said.
In the meantime, leave a comment down below.
How do you squat?
How do you squat most comfortably?
What are the issues that you run into when you squat?
And then let me know if this video was helpful by leaving me a thumb's up.
I'll see you guys back here again in just a few days.