What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx.com.
Today we're talking about the squat and how your feet should be positioned, or maybe not
your feet.
You see a lot of guys, you've probably heard the cue, turn your toes out a little bit in
order to get a better depth into your squad, because a lot of us get stuck.
We try to go down deeper into a squat, but we run out of room down there in our hip joint.
We might feel it in the form of a pinch, or we might just get down to the bottom and say,
I can't go any further without other compensations up and down the kinetic chain.
But the problem a lot of times in the cue.
Toes out is not going to solve your problem.
You need to think more up the chain towards the knees because we need those needs to be
out.
And the difference here is the feet themselves have a bit of extra rotation capability that
are a bit independent from what's going on above it.
And by the way, this is a pretty badly cracked fibula.
Don't let this happen to you.
If you're going to try to squat, ignore this.
This part I'm talking about is the foot.
So you want to make sure that you're not just turning your toes out because they can move
relatively independent from what's going on above.
Not entirely, but relatively.
We have much more ability to create what we're trying to do when we focus on getting the
knee itself externally rotated, turned out.
Why?
Because when we get to the hip, joint itself was getting stuck a lot of times is the ball
in the socket that acetabulum.
Whether it's face too forward, the orientation itself is what causes issues for people or
makes it different between one person and the other.
So when I bring my leg up, if the leg isn't rotated enough, what happens is as I come
up to the front here, I actually hit a bony block.
When I get to a certain amount of flexion here, I have a bony block and I can't get
any higher.
You can see right here I've run out of room, but what if I can get to more external rotation
and that's by focusing on what's happening at the knee, as I get up to here, you can
see how much deeper I can go.
I freed up that bony block by clearing it with more external rotation.
So instead of cuing your feet, you do this.
You get in this position here and you turn your knees out.
And what it does is a few things.
Number one, it gives us the ability to get more contribution in activation of the adductor's
because we're on a little bit more of a stretch.
The adductor's can help us with extension of the hip.
So when we're down the bottom of a squat and we come up out of it, we want hip extension.
So in assistance to the hamstrings, in assistance to the glutes, we get adductor activation.
This is so important that oftentimes when somebody comes to me with hip pain or hip
pain following squats, whether it's from an impingement or just a history of degeneration,
if they squat and then they say that they don't have adductor soreness the next day,
then I know they're not doing this right.
You have to then focus on getting your knees out more because you want those adductor's
to contribute.
The next thing it does is it brings in some additional help.
We want the glutes to participate in getting us out of the bottom of a squat.
And you could feel how much they can contribute just by doing this.
Stand up if you're watching us sitting down right now.
Turn your toes in as much as you can.
Now, try to squeeze your glutes as hard as you can.
You're not going to feel that much going on there.
Now, without doing anything else, I'm not going to change the strength of your glutes,
I'm just going to change the orientation of your body in space here.
I'm going to turn my hips out into more external rotation, not the toes, the hips by getting
the knees out there.
Now I squeeze my glutes and I feel much more of a contraction, as you will, too.
We know we have a lot more strength there.
So if we can get the glutes to contribute with more strength here, then we've got the
winning combination.
So how would I cue this and make sure you're doing this properly?
Well, again, focus not on the feet, but on the knees.
Get those knees turned out about 20 to 30 degrees and now I take my hands right here
and I want you to take your hands and put it right here in the creases of your legs,
right in that hip joint.
Now visualize sitting down, having the pelvis drop right down so that just like I showed
you as that leg went up into flexion, you got to drop that pelvis down in between.
So if I'm right here, I drop straight down into my hands at the floor and you can see
that my pelvis actually dropped inside my femurs.
They re traveling out here but they've cleared room for this up and down path of the pelvis.
That is going to give you the type of cue that you're looking for.
Now, the final thing, how would you reinforce this?
How would you want to make sure that you're doing this properly?
Well, number one, you've got to make sure that your adductors are flexible enough to
allow this, because as your knees start traveling out, you want to make sure that you have the
flexibility to allow you to continue to drop down those adductor are going to feel some
of that stretch we talked about.
That beneficial stretch that creates the reflex to get you back up out of the bottom.
And the other thing is you want to make sure that you do strengthen the external rotators
of the hip and I like to do it out of a flex position.
So one of my favorite things to do is a simple clamshell exercise.
Just laying on your side, placing the band just above the knees, having the hips flexed
here, and then, of course, working on external rotation strength of the Glute Medius from
this position.
The addition of this the stretch in this exercise are really there just to reinforce what it
is we're focusing on, and that is cuing you better to not focus on just the position of
the foot, but more importantly, on the knees.
And by the way, when your knees are traveling out, they're going to find that it's a little
easier for them to track out over those toes.
And again, going beyond the toes is something that I've done an entire video about why it's
important to allow your knees to track that way.
It's just going to be a lot easier for people when you don't have to go all the way in the
sagittal plane.
You have some of this tendency to move out into the frontal plane that's going to make
that all a hell of a lot easier for you to execute.
All right guys I hope you found this video helpful.
Make sure you try this out.
If you're having any problem at all in getting down to depth where you feel that bony block
or impingement in your hip, this is going to help you tremendously.
If you're looking for programs, guys, where we put the science back in strength step by
step, all our plans are laid out over at Athleanx.com.
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All right guys, see you soon.