Starting Strength

that the external rotators include two of the abductor muscles.) External rotation is critical to stabilizing gait mechanics through the stride. As it relates to our analysis, the action of rotating the femurs out is what actually occurs when you shove your knees out on the way down to the bottom of the squat. Prove this to yourself by sitting in a chair and rotating your femurs the same way you would if you were standing up and pivoting on your heels to point your toes out. Using the external rotators to set the knees in a position parallel to the feet makes all kinds of sense when you consider that they are in an effective position to do it and the TFL is not. So shoving the knees out at the top of the squat, and keeping them there so that the adductors can do their job, is accomplished by the muscles that rotate the hips externally. These muscles anchor the thigh position that allows for both good squat depth and the more effective use of all the muscles of the hips.

    Figure 2-44. (A) Adductor anatomy of the right thigh. (B, C) Deep external rotator anatomy of right thigh.

    When you intentionally shove your knees to the outside as you come down into the bottom of the squat, not only do you get the femurs away from the ASIS and the gut, but you also allow the adductors to stretch tighter and position themselves to more effectively contract as they reach the limit of their extensibility. A tight, stretched muscle contracts harder than a looser, shorter muscle does because the stretch tells the neuromuscular system that a contraction is about to follow. A more efficient firing of more contractile units always happens when preceded by a stretch. This stretch reflex is an integral part of all explosive muscle contraction, and better athletes are very good at making it happen. Test this by trying to do a vertical jump without any drop before the jump; you will find this virtually impossible to do because the stretch reflex is such an integral part of the sequence of any explosive muscular contraction. When we squat, the hips’ external rotators position the femurs so that the adductors and the external rotators themselves can participate with the hamstrings in the bounce, and the whole hip musculature can contribute to squatting efficiency – if you shove your knees out.
    The bounce you feel when you stretch out the hamstrings, glutes, and adductors at the bottom of the squat is not due to knee ligament tightness or rebound. The correctly performed squat is an ACL/PCL-neutral event. You bounce off of the stretched and tightened components of the posterior chain and the now correctly loaded quadriceps, and it is absolutely safe for the knees.
    Your timing here is important. If the bounce is used correctly, it will be immediately followed by a hard drive up of the hips. It is important that the bounce is not followed by a pause and then a drive up. The bounce must be incorporated into the drive – it must be anticipated as the first part of the drive . Think about the “up” drive all the way down during the descent. Don’t think about going down while you’re going down – think about coming up the whole time. Doing this will reduce the tendency to separate the drive from the bounce, because the drive is being anticipated even before the bounce occurs. The timing of your descent and rebound is critical to the performance of good squats. Bounce occurs optimally at the correct speed of descent. If your descent is too fast, the bounce will be less effective, and much less safe, because the only way to drop too fast is to relax something. Muscles tightened in the squat descent store elastic energy; tight muscles also keep your back, hips, and knees in the correct, safe positions. If you are loose enough to drop into the bottom of the squat much faster than you can come up, you need to tighten up more – and it may help to think of this as slowing – on the way down. A loose descent can allow joints to be jammed into positions they should not occupy, and this is how most people get hurt squatting: getting out of good position by going down so fast that they cannot maintain proper technique. This may be how squats got an undeserved bad reputation. Don’t contribute to the problem by dive-bombing into the bottom.
    The limit of the adductors’ and hamstrings’ extensibility will almost always be below parallel, as defined earlier. The hamstrings’ length does not change that much anyway, since the knees and hips