Starting Strength

do it because they are merely copying what they’ve seen the strong guys do. This is a practice best left to very experienced powerlifters. For you, it will be very important to have all the bones of the legs and hips in the best position to generate force without causing tendon and ligament problems. Here is a way to see this relationship: sit in a chair with your knees slightly bent and your feet out in front of you, without pushing hard on the floor. Put your legs together, and note that your toes are pointing straight forward. Spread them out wide and note that your toes are pointing out. In both positions, your feet naturally assume a position parallel to your femurs, and your knees are in an anatomically neutral position, with no twisting ( Figure 2-52 ). As your knees point out, your toes point out. The wider the knees, the more the toes point out. As the knees widen, the femurs rotate externally, the tibias follow to keep the knee ligaments in their normal anatomical position, and the toes point out more because they are attached to the end of the tibias. This anatomical relationship must be understood and respected so that avoidable knee injuries don’t happen.
    The practice of placing a block or a 2x4 under the heels is common. Most gyms keep one lying around somewhere. People use the block to make the full squat position easier to reach, and understanding why this works is necessary for understanding why you should not do it. A block under the heels tilts the shins forward by lifting the ankles and allowing the knees to move forward without stretching the ankle joints. This shin angle closes the knee angle and causes the hamstrings’ attachment point on the back of the tibia to move closer to their origin on the pelvis, loosening the muscle a little and thus decreasing the amount of stretch necessary to get to full depth. Weightlifting shoes with a heel height of between ½ and ¾ inches provide a little lift that helps tilt the shins enough to involve the quads a little more, but a heel height of 1½ to 2 inches is as bad as a 2x4. If you are having “flexibility” problems severe enough that you need a block under your heels in order to squat deep, your problem is most likely your stance and your knee position, as discussed earlier.
     
    The Master Cue
     
    There is an important mental trick that you can use to fix most things wrong with the bar path in the squat and all the resultant errors made by the body. The trick is amazingly simple, and it corrects a wide variety of technique problems, from knees to back angle, from air under the heels to a wobbly bar path. This trick is simply keeping the barbell over the mid-foot by thinking about doing so.
    The case for barbell training was built around the idea of balance by observing that the most efficient form to use was that which keeps the bar in a vertical relationship with the middle of the foot. If you do this, the back angle will be determined by the position of the bar on the back. Furthermore, if you keep your spine rigid, and the bar travels up and down in the imaginary slot directly above the mid-foot, then the knees, hips, and ankles will do what they must do to maintain this vertical relationship, and the body will solve all the problems associated with doing so at a level beneath any requirement for micromanagement. In a similar fashion, if you make the bar path vertical when you are deadlifting, the biomechanics of the pull will be correct because the task of making the path vertical causes you to solve the problem with your “body,” not your “brain.” This concept is an example of a bar cue , which enables the body itself to sort out complex motor problems by jumping past the analysis to the result. You have been solving movement problems your whole life, and if you’re a natural athlete, you’ve been doing it well. By giving the body a general task instead of a specific one, you move your brain out of the way and allow your accumulated motor skills to solve the problem. If you command the bar to move in a vertical line, it will do so, and you will move your back, thighs, and shins in a way that makes it do so without your having to analyze the exact problem.
    For the squat, you do this by constructing a mental image of an actual slot in the air for the bar to travel within. Visualize this narrow slot over the mid-foot, extending up into the air above you. Then visualize the bar traveling within this slot. An amazing thing then