WARNING! Are You Overcorrecting Your Clients’ Squat Form?
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ey there coaches and athletes Michael Hughes here, functional movement specialist and CEO of Gymnazo Edu. Today, like most days, I’m going to go against the grain and talk about squat form. And how this kind of squat right here. Well, there’s really no longer the gold standard. So stick around if you want to expand your mind outside of the box of what should and should not be done around squats. But first, make sure to subscribe to our channel to get new perspectives, new ideas and a new lens on how to think about movement every single week. Now I hear and read the conversations going on all the time about what is the best squat for this, or the best position for the lower body joints. So they are bullet proof for that, whether its knees over toes, valgus, or various butt winks or heel lifts, there’s a good and bad reason for all of them when doing squats. As a functional movement specialist for the past 10 plus years, my goal is to train for effective and efficient principle movement intention, not training athletes to fit into a box solely based on what a bell curve demonstrates, from studies claiming evidence. Now, I know that’s quite the statement. But my intention for every video that I make is to basically tell us moving practitioners that we should use movement, first thinking based upon undeniable truths of physics, biology and behavioral sciences. And I really have to thank mentors of mine, Gary Gray, and Dave Cabrillo for guiding me to think bigger than what my college education gave me. Well, how do we think about squats? Well, it’s really comes down to this is a big, big piece, it’s come down to our intention of what do we want to use squats for? And there’s two major intentions, right for functional life, or for fitness life. And what I mean by that is for functional life is like, how do we actually go throughout our day, and all the things that we do, that we plan on doing or don’t plan on doing? Well, that’s kind of function for fitness life, or it’s really for the intention or for the fitness that I want these muscles to look better. I want them to perform to lift something that is very, very well planned out in my day, like, I want to pick up a barbell that’s very fitness focused. You know, again, what I mean by this is like, do we plan on picking up a seven or eight inch steel bar that is perfectly rounded with equal weights on both sides? And our functional daily life? And the answer is simply no, that’s not something we do often or essentially, ever outside of the training environment, or the physique, fitness environment. Nothing wrong or right about what I’m just saying. It’s just stating the facts, right? That’s just what it is. Just doesn’t happen that often. Do we pick up things from the side? Oh, that’s a little bit and probably much more frequent than a bar in front of us. But I’m just stating like, what do we use squats for? There’s function. And then there’s fitness, just kind of two parameters I want us to think about. So if we get out of that, kind of like wrong or Reitman mentality, and kind of start to think about, we got to expand our box of potential, because what is considered safe or good squats, and bad or dangerous squats, as an example, having your knees go away? Toes, like, oh, that’s gonna be very dangerous, potentially. Or maybe having your heels lift off like, oh, man, that’s not a good form. For a squat. Well, maybe doing a squat and that kind of bunk kind of button on the side. Okay, those who have considered relatively bad form, okay, but why is it considered bad form? And can that be good form? Maybe some people saying No way, that’s not even possible. Let’s think about its member from a bigger standpoint, not just from a fitness standpoint, but from a functional standpoint, I’m gonna dive into these reasons a little bit later, so hang with me. So if there’s no such thing, it just seems as if there’s no such thing as a bad or dangerous squat, then why do people get hurt? Why did joints get ruined? Why do we get knee replacements, hip replacements? Why do we all those things happen? I will if those things are true, which I definitely agree with you they are true. And therefore, there is a bad exercise.
And here’s how we define it. There is a bad exercise, because it’s given to the wrong person at the wrong time, for the wrong reason. Basically, the intention is wrong. So if we give it to the wrong person, right, giving a squat, loaded, unloaded, you know, all over the place? Well, that person may not have the joint structure, the ligament structure to be able to manage that squat is maybe given to someone who’s particularly too old or too young or too focused to brandom. Alright, maybe too much weight, too little weight. Wrong person. We’ve got the wrong time. The periodization schedule is off the progression schedule is off there in season versus offseason versus preseason is off. So therefore, that’s not a good idea for that particular athlete at that time. Fair enough, okay? And for the wrong reason, should you give a catcher’s squat a baseball catcher squat, for someone who’s just gone after a knee replacement? Oh, the intention is that that’s not what they need it for, they just needed to hike around and move through their day. So again, there’s a lot of reasons why there is a bad exercise. But it’s not necessarily the exercise by itself. That’s a clear point I would like to make. It’s not the exercise that is bad. It’s, again, the parameters of why it was given to that athlete in the first place. So there’s a few kind of ways to think about right, you have a volleyball player, getting it for a huge valgus knee position, loading and unloading. Some people say in the forms that that’s a bad squat. No, that’s a squat that that volleyball player needed to accomplish to get that ball back over the net. What about the basketball players all over the place, super wide toes open, knees flared, and knees flare flared out, getting into a vertically loaded position. Oh, that’s going to put extra strain on the tissues, I get it. But that’s what that player needed to do to make that play to make it happen. Why can that be very good? Again, we’ll talk about that in a brief second. And then look at that. Butterwick Oh, my goodness, look at the heel lift, look at the knees pressure. It’s incredible. How can that person ever do a squat like that? That is so bad for them? Is it really? Or is that a fine tuned athlete, who understands how to control deceleration of all those joints and excess loading and all those joints? Again, not just because it’s good or bad. It’s why behind it. Because what we don’t want is this, we don’t want to be having our daily functional life be inhibited, because of bad squats, bad hips, bad knees, bad ankles, for getting in and out of a car being something that weathers us bothers us as functional movement practitioners, we need to be able to train around these things and through these things. So how can we do that? What does this video really come towards? Well, I’m gonna give you two technical reasons to think about right. So techniques, basically. So think about doing squats, from a vantage point that puts variety and intentional differential focus on the different muscles and joints as they’re being used in function. So for those functional people out there, we think well, what does that mean? Well, we have six distinct squats that cover the bases, and we call them SFT, squats, sagittal, frontal and transverse foot position changes that allow us to cover the grand scope of how we can squat. So if I put my right foot in front of my left, and I squat down, well, what have I essentially done? Well, I’ve essentially allowed my right hip to go under less flexion, than my left hip, because my left foot is behind me. So therefore, it has to go under more flexion sooner than my right hip in the sagittal plane. Well, from my knees perspective, I’m going to get more flexion, also in my left knee than my right knee. So that allows me again, to play focuses and dial in intentions of what I want. And again, the same thing happens with my ankle, I’m gonna get more dorsiflexion on my left and less dorsiflexion. On my right, can all sagittal plane descriptions, but very, very simple. And I could do the exact same thing and switch it out. So now I’m biasing my weight load, and therefore my joint load as appropriate. Why would that be important? Well, this is very much a common stance for locomotion for walking. So therefore, I can progress myself and focus in on myself as I desire just by those two different foot positions, versus simply the balanced foot position here. Again, nothing wrong or right about balancing a position. But again, life is not balanced. And even if we want to talk about fitness, right, we want to focus in more on a tissue to develop it more, we can pre position ourselves with different squat positions, which allows us again, to think about deeper than just the good old standard. Let’s keep it systematically stable. So what if we go wide? What are we doing with this change in our wide position? Well, now, because of the load of our of our musculature, we’re going to put more stress on the adductors just because they’re loaded more the bands are stretched out more so therefore, we can put more training in those particular tissues, just like you saw LeBron James doing as he’s getting after it. So if we can practice this squat, and we need to get into that defensive position, boom, we are tissues are saying I’ve been there I’ve done that. I now know how to control that position, versus offloaded into the connective tissue of the joints, knees, ankles and hips. Which brings me to a much larger discussion is that’s what we should be focused Sunan we need to take our squats into a place that allow us for the tissues to take the load, not the joint connective tissue to take the load. So I’ll describe that in a little bit more detail. But what about narrow stance, if I go to a narrow stance, I’m putting more pressure on the lateral tissues, that the TFLs the IT band, even the the lateral glute muscles, right, so then they’re going to take that for that progressive load more based on those positions. What if I go to open, we’re now playing with the external rotation of the hip joint, even though my knee and my toe are relatively still in alignment, I’m now taking and saying add doctors in a rotational component, let’s take you into more pressure glutes, let’s kind of take you down. But let’s kind of take you out of the equation a little bit more. And the same thing happens when I go toe in. Again, from a knee and ankle standpoint, it’s no different than squatting with my with my knees right over my toes in a very safe position. But I’m saying glutes How about you take more of the load and abductors, you can kind of tone it down a little bit more, I’m focusing in on where I want the pressure to go there for the muscle gain to go there for the intention of my power. Again, the big stance that I want you to think about is that from those six different positions that I that I’ve done, which you can go into 66 of those positions, if you really want it to change in multiple different facets. It’s not that it’s a good and bad position. Is that can the connective tissue, the muscles, the fascia, can they take the heat? Do they have the flexibility and strength to do so if they do, then that means it’s going to reduce the pressure off of the joints, therefore the ligaments, and therefore the meniscus and those for the capsules, right. That’s how I want you to think about squats, is it appropriate for the person to do is also is it appropriate for the joint to manage the ankle has crazy amounts of dorsiflexion plantar flexion, and has really good amounts of actual rotation as well as pretty good amount of actual flexion to the right and flexion to the left, call it basically lump it all together as pronation supination. The knee has crazy amounts of flexion and extension. It has decent amounts of valgus Singh and VeriSign a little bit more of one than the other. But it has very little amount of rotation from an out of sync perspective, meaning that the TIB fib go right and the femur go left. So we don’t want to train a squat that way, that’s going to be a very bad way to do it. But then he has a crazy amount of rotation in sync, meaning that the TIB fib and the femur go the same direction the same time here. And there. As long as the ankle says I can give you that much rotation, the TIB fib and saying, hey, I can play that rotation game. And as long as the hip says I can give you that amount of rotation, the femur saying hey, I can play that game too. And therefore, this brings me into the squat of a driving of a pelvis. What if I drive the pelvis to the right and a squat, drive the pelvis to the left in a squat, drive the pelvis into a rotational turn in a squat, drive the rotation in opposite way you see on my knees are rotating and moving left and right. If my ankle and hip play that game, well, if I’ve done a good job of mobilizing those two joints, then I’ve opened up the floodgates of greater possibilities of a squat, for function for sport for power generation, and even for physique development. Because I can get more obtuse angles to get those muscle fibers to fire up a little bit sharper, that don’t get hit by a standard Ford balanced sneeze over kind of shoulder squat.
So these things are kind of essential to know to dive deeper into what our squatting can be, versus just what the books have told us. And this is what our multi dimensional movement coaching mentorship does, that allows us to think about things from a deeper perspective, from a principles perspective, what are the principles of the ankle and knee and hip? What are the true facts about the physics that we respond to? What’s the biology of those muscles and the joints and the connective tissue? What are the ranges of motion that our hips can go into in the frontal plane only versus in the transverse plane only? And how can you understand and unpack those to give ourselves the freedom to apply good form, and bad form, quote, unquote, even though I don’t believe it’s good and bad to the particular population in front of us for the most effective and efficient movement that they can possibly achieve, based upon what their biology has given them. And that’s the fun part about it. And that’s why there’s so much more to just the form and a function of a squat. So if you liked this split this video, please don’t forget to like and subscribe so we can continue to make more content like this every single week. Thanks for watching. Thanks for your comments. It’s always excited to dive into deeper context about what is going on and what we’re trying to share as what we’ve realized from all ventures that have taught us, have a great day. Talk to you soon.
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