Starting Strength

2-51. A terribly useful block of wood. Touch the block, but don’t knock it over.

    In order for this knee-control technique to work, you’ll need to actually look down at your knees so that you’ll know what they are doing in response to your direction. In your squat stance, at the top with the bar in position on your back, look straight down at a point on the floor between your toes. You will see a picture of your knees relative to your feet, and the movement of your knees relative to your toes will be apparent as you descend. Look at your knees all the way down and back up a couple of times with the empty bar. You will need to practice this because it will seem awkward at first. But as you watch your knees change position through the movement and as the sets get heavier, you will see exactly what the problems are and you will have immediate feedback on what you need to do to correct them. If your concept of the squat is correct, this technique is the best way to fix your knee problems.
     
    Feet and stance
     
    As previously noted, the interaction with the feet against the floor is central to the entire concept of the squat. The middle of the feet is the point of balance against the floor, and the bar must remain directly above this point for the system to be in balance. Remember that in our recommended stance, the heels are about shoulder width apart, with the toes pointed out at about 30 degrees. Stance is a highly individual thing and will vary with hip width, hip ligament tightness, femur and tibia length and proportion, adductor and hamstring flexibility, knee joint alignment, and ankle flexibility. Everybody’s stance will be slightly different, but shoulder-width heels, with toes at 30 degrees, is a good place to start.
    As noted earlier, stance width will influence knee position. For example, if you are tall with very long femurs and relatively narrow shoulders, you need a wider stance than is usually recommended. If you have a long torso and short legs (not that uncommon a body type), you will need a bit narrower stance than our rule of thumb would predict. Sometimes the foot angle needs to be adjusted for individual situations: if you are pigeon-toed, your foot angle will need to be slightly more forward-pointing than our model recommends, or more commonly, in the case of out-toeing, the feet will need to be pointed out more. These corrections are necessary to keep the correct neutral relationship between the femur and the tibia so that no twisting occurs in the capsular, medial, and lateral ligaments of the knee. Expect a closer stance to place the knees more forward relative to the toes, and a wider stance to place them farther back (see Figure 2-52 ). But again, shoulder-width heels produces the best effect for general strength training.

    Figure 2-52. The relationship between stance width, stance angle, and knee angle. The wider the stance, the more the toes point out, due to the changing angle of the femurs at the pelvis as width increases. The feet keep the tibias rotated in line with the femurs – and keep the stress off the knees – by changing their angle to accommodate the rotation. As explained on earlier , the moment arm along the femur is calculated from the position of the bar over midfoot. The knee “sees” the moment arm from knee to bar and the hip “sees” the moment arm from hip to bar. ( M.A. = moment arm )

    A narrow-stance squat, such as that frequently pictured in the muscle magazines, develops an aesthetically pleasing set of quads. But since we plan to use the rest of the hip musculature, too, it seems unwise to omit it from the training program. It is very difficult for people of normal flexibility to get deep enough with a narrow stance, so the hamstrings are never engaged as fully as they would be with a more generalized wider stance. Also, the narrow stance does not involve the groin muscles, as discussed earlier. For this reason, it can be useful in the event of a groin injury and can be used for several weeks while the adductors are healing. If used all the time, however, narrow-stance squatting predisposes you to a groin injury due to the lack of conditioning for these muscles.
    One occasionally sees powerlifters squatting with a wide stance and their toes pointing almost forward. Some really strong powerlifters do this to increase the joint tightness and resultant rebound obtained by placing an additional twist on the knee and hip ligaments. Some of the others