Starting Strength

Think about your heels, and how it feels to have your weight balanced on them. Assume your squat stance, pick up your toes, and rock back onto your heels. Once your weight is on your heels, shove your knees out and squat. When you squat from the heels, your knees stay back, and if you stay in balance, your back angle will have adjusted to a more horizontal position as well. Now, you will not be able to continue to squat on your heels because this is also an unbalanced position. But after three or four reps, this trick will have done its job and you will have settled into the middle of your feet with your knees in the correct position, not too far out over the toes. This position will feel balanced and strong, and done correctly a few times, it will be the one you favor from then on.
    A different problem, often encountered in more advanced trainees, is the tendency to let the knees slide forward as the bottom approaches. This problem usually develops over time, and the embedded movement pattern can be hard to fix if you let it go uncorrected too long. And it is potentially complicated. If your knees move forward at the bottom of the squat, you may have relaxed your quads, which hold the knees open; the closed knee angle in turn shortens the hamstrings, which then are slacked distally and therefore cannot be used effectively for proximal hip extension. Quads maintain the knee angle, which in turn anchors the hamstrings as they tighten with greater squat depth and a more closed hip angle so that they can extend the hips on the way up. Or you may have relaxed the hamstrings’ tension on the tibias, dorsiflexed your ankles, and shifted forward to your toes from the bottom. The soleus anchors the knee angle from the distal end, and the gastrocnemius adds to this effect by crossing the knee joint to the distal femur, to anchor the knee to the ankle. The squat is essentially an interaction with the ground and your balance point over the mid-foot. All these muscles, if relaxed at the bottom of the squat, have to be retightened to be used effectively, and this is hard to do from what are now terribly inefficient skeletal positions.

    Figure 2-48. If the knee slides forward – note the partial squat and the inclination of the tibia – the increased pull from the knee develops high tension against the attachments on the pelvis. This can cause an interesting type of tendinitis.

    The fact is that most people don’t like to maintain tension in the quads, the calves, and the posterior chain as they approach the bottom of the squat. It is indeed a lot of work to maintain tension in these components as the angles become more closed, the muscles reach the end of their ability to extend, and the tendons become stretched and tight. Tempting as it may be to relax forward, doing so is obviously inefficient because it eliminates the possibility of storing elastic energy in the extensible components as they stretch out and get nearer to the point of activating the stretch reflex as the direction of the movement reverses. Relaxing forward also increases the risk of injury because low-back relaxation often comes along for the ride.

    Figure 2-49. The relationship of the quads, hamstrings, and gastrocs at the bottom of the squat. All work together to maintain the knee angle, and letting the knees slide forward indicates a failure in this relationship.

    The answer is to learn to squat with the knees in the proper place and to move them correctly during the descent. If the knees are moving out as the femurs externally rotate, their forward travel will be limited to that which is normal for your anthropometry in a correct squat, where all of the forward knee travel occurs in the first third or half of the descent. After that, the knees just stay in place and the hips account for the rest of the movement. So, from the very top, shove the knees forward and out to the place where they will end up, just in front of the toes, and stop them there; the rest of the descent will consist of the hips moving back and down. Make two movements out of this for a couple of reps, and then reduce this sequence to a smooth single motion ( Figure 2-50 ). A useful way to learn this is to place a block of wood in front of your knees, as illustrated in Figure 2-51 .

    Figure 2-50. Note that the knees, once they move forward to their position over the toes, do not move during the remainder of the squat until the ascent carries them back up to this point.

    Figure