Can the knees go over the toes? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Can the knees go over the toes? (2016)

squatuniversity.com

112 pointsTomte68 comments

Looks easy and obvious, but getting the ankle and hip mobility required to squat properly this is quite difficult for us who spend most of their in front of computers. When I started lifting, my squats sucked, and I didn't even realize before I hired a trainer who told me. I had to significantly reduce my squat weight and start from scratch paying attention to doing deep squats with good form.

It took me about a year of consistent mobility training to get the ankle mobility and hip internal rotation required to squat right.

Though if you wear lifting shoes that's a nice shortcut. It can reduce the mobility requirements significantly. I prefer to squat without lifting shoes just because I want to be able to do it naturally, and I don't compete or anything like that.

It's really important to get good advice too, sometimes your gym-buds can see you're not doing it right, but they don't know it's because of mobility issues so they just think you're not listening.

I was lucky to keep my mobility from rollerblading and riding as a kid, so when I moved into powerlifting after 5 years of mostly sedentary computer work, I was still pretty loose.

I had a similar experience with a trainer. Did squats, said my form was mostly good but wanted to test some things out. Did a quick ankle mobility check, saw that it was a problem. Slipped some 5lb weights under my heels, told me to squat again and it was an incredible difference. The balancing was so much easier and it felt much better when going lower. Really showed the value a trainer could bring. That was day 1.

How did you find a good trainer? Any certs/qualifications you should look for?

The Starting Strength Coach certification is a good one to look for.

I got lucky. I did no research before hand. There was a gym near me offering a deal for personal training and I signed up with an instructor who had a similar body style to what I wanted to achieve tbh.

Shoes, wraps, belts, heel chicks etc are not a short cut. They are a training aid.

Without them your mobility may be bad. You may not have the right tension in places. These tools help get the right feel and you can train under load. Increasing your max load which translates to an increase in your unaided load.

I'm having trouble googling for heel chick, could you share a link to what it is?

Blocks maybe

Sorry. Auto correct: heel chocks. Exactly what it sounds like. If you don’t have lifting shoes, and don’t like using coin plates, you can stand on other things that raise your heel.

Edit: Internet tells me they might be called squat wedges.

I think it's more that you now rely on a piece of equipment to do your workout. Say you're on holiday, you can't just hop into a random gym and get your leg workout done. You'd have to bring your squat shoes with you.

No, I'll just do the workout without those shoes. Which will be less effective because less stimulus is being presented, but still worth doing.

I'll just be on holiday.

Or that! TBH that's what I usually do

These tools are training aids and you can still squat without them. If you don't have them you just don't use them. You don't have to squat large percentages every session.

Wraps absolutely are a short cut in that every lifter can instantly lift more wearing them due to the elastic tension they're able to provide.

I don't think there is much evidence suggesting training squats wrapped would then result in the unwrapped squat being stronger for an elite lifter. I'd actually be concerned that the technical changes and also the different strength curve for a wrapped squat might throw off someone's regular squat.

All else being equal it's still potentially meaningful stimulus. There's no way it doesn't translate if you're training wrapped in a way that would stimulates hypertrophy or strength increase - it's an offset upwards, sure, but the muscles will still respond to the work.

A wrapped squat is still a squat. Do heavy knee wraps allow you to squat more? Absolutely. But other than the weight being higher, you squat basically the same with or without wraps. So training in wraps will absolutely help your raw squat -- it isn't like the wraps take away all muscle stimulus from the squat.

That being said, I think most lifters hold off on doing wraps until close to a competition or when hitting near max. Wraps are painful and take a lot of work to put on if doing them tight, so it isn't something you do on every squat. Also, I think people over-estimate how much extra weight one can lift with wraps versus without. It varies from one lifter to the next, but I think the average might be around 10%.

Source -- powerlifter of 10+ years who trains both regular and wrapped squats all the time.

How to improve ankle mobility?

Check out ATG split squats

Check out the Squat University youtube channel for instructional videos on "Banded Ankle Mobilizations".

Completely changed the game for my squats, with instant results. I incorporate them (along with a similar hip mobilization drill) before all of my squat workouts. Highly recommended.

You can find lots of good exercises and drills on YouTube, but are you sure you are asking the right question? Are you 100% sure that ankle mobility is your problem?

In my case, I thought that ankle mobility is my problem but after working on my ankles for several months I didn't see the huge improvement I expected, and only then I realized that I have other mobility deficiencies such as hip flexion and rotation and my spine.

If you are not sure what your problem is, you should hire and expert for an assessment. A lot of the stuff you find online is great, but only if you exactly know what you're looking for.

I’ve been on a reboot too. I squatted through bad mobility for years and got quite strong, but reinforced all of the bad movement patterns. It’s been hard to unlearn that muscle memory.

Opening up and releasing my chest, t-spine and pelvic floor has been a long and slow process (8 months so far) but I’m finally relearning proper movement.

What sort of programming did you use to work ok your mobility? I’ve been looking to do the same.

I highly recommend Dr. Kelly Starrett for all things mobility. Thereadystate.com (his website) is my daily source of mobility instruction, both for daily mobility work, and for getting me through many an injury. Reading the Supple Leopard (his book) is useful, but it’s hard to beat the follow-along videos for usefulness.

Plus, he’s a huge Dune nerd, which comes through in occasionally hilarious ways.

I am horribly inflexible _except_ for this one thing. As a kid we used to always play and rest in a deep squat position, and it just stayed that way growing up. It's still my default resting position on hikes or at the gym. As a result I can squat really deep, but ask me to touch my toes and I'll get shin-depth at best.

Sometimes I have wondered if having no resistance at the bottom when I squat is actually hindering me. I've seen people kind of "bounce" out of their squat, as if the resistance they hit at the bottom acts like a sort of spring past their tension point. Whereas in my case, there is no "bounce" and no resistance. If I kept going as low as I can, I'd just end up with my butt on the floor in the squat with nothing springing me back. In the end, I don't go too far below parallel with a loaded barbell because I feel the rest of my squat technique and power output gets compromised at that depth.

The longer your femur (taller body) the harder to deep squat since you need more forward flexion on the ankles. Lifting shoes are not a shortcut but a solution.

We’re told that you need to squat with a vertical spine and vertical shins. Even high school kids figure out that’s impossible to do.

I’m in full alignment with the article: squatting is just about balance in the end: how can you keep your center of gravity over mid foot as you bring your hips below (or near) your knees and back up again. You might find cues that help you find a good, repeatable position (break at the hips, stay tall, weight back, drop into your ankles, knees out, etc), but that’s personal to you. If you squat a lot, you’ll find the positions that knock you off balance, or bother your hips, or cause strain on your ankles, or whatever, and learn to avoid them with cues that help you find the groove where nothing hurts.

There's so much "bro-science" when it comes to exercise. I suspect many of this nonsense comes from people getting injured by doing too much too soon, and then generalizing it. Like toes in squats, or pelvic tilt in squats, or locking knees in leg presses. There's some truth that all of these can be dangerous if you're a beginner and you're handling more weight than you should. But the whole point of exercise is that your body adapts. You need to give it time. Tendons, ligaments, and joints take much longer to "get stronger" than muscle does.

This is a super interesting case of how outdated ideas (ie. knees can _never_ go over toes) become pervasive in people's minds, almost to the point of a myth that is very hard to dispel. The story of kneesovertoesguy is amazing btw, I recommend checking his podcast episodes/youtube channel and training program (https://www.atgonlinecoaching.com/) which focus on knee and lower body strengthening that uses exercises that were a no-go for many experts not too long ago.

(EDIT: sorry for the plug, I'm not related to kneesovertoesguy or his business in any way -- I just noticed the landing page I shared above is literally a call to pay for his courses. I'm not and never been a subscriber but do enjoy and have been seeing real benefits from doing exercises he goes through on his youtube for free. So I hope it helps!)

There’s also KneesOverToesGuy who focuses on deep lunges with knees over toes to get full range of motion in the knees and supporting tissues.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCGybO-bWZ3W6URh42sdMQiw

I've always found something a bit off about this guy, so since finding out I feel I have to mention in regularly when he comes up: he's a Scientologist.

thanks for the heads up! Hopefully Marcus Filly isn't a Scientologist because they both sometimes do workouts together. I really like Fillys programming but ... if so, no money goes towards Scientology.

Seen this come up a few times - this may be true, but you have to separate the art from the artist in this case (in my opinion). What he teaches has solid foundations, with multiple testimonies from legitimate athletes. Whether he believes weak knees come from ancient alien souls is not my concern, but his methodologies to fix such ailments are absolutely credible.

As I said in the comment below, my point is more that I don't want to give ad revenue to people like him.

    >What he teaches has solid foundations, with multiple testimonies from legitimate athletes.

There are many channels with similar advice, I'd rather give clicks to them. Fitness FAQ comes to mind first.

I've always found the way he talks about "world-class" and "bulletproof" knees to be pretty off-putting. These are nonsense terms with nothing but anecdata to back the claims

Whenever someone is promoting "The Truth" which is so much better then the stuff other people offer, I'm immediately suspicious and repulsed.

In my experience the best experts are humble.

He actually has objective definitions for world class: can perform a certain range of movement with a certain strength. Bulletproof is just another term for robustness or avoiding injury and here he sometimes refers to studies on injury.

What is the point of an objective definition if its subjectively determined by one person? Who is he to decide what is world-class and what isn't?

And for "bulletproof", I know what it means. It's, again, just another subjective term he throws around carelessly. Something bulletproof is something near indestructuble. Does he guarantee no injuries for life if you complete the course?

Tom Cruise is a scientologist, and he's a good actor.

Maybe KneesOverToesGuy is a scientologist and knows a lot about knees!

It's not like being a scientologist makes you completely incompetent.

    >Maybe KneesOverToesGuy is a scientologist and knows a lot about knees!

He seems to have good advice, my point is more that I don't want to give ad revenue to people like him.

    >It's not like being a scientologist makes you completely incompetent.

No, but the thing I've always disliked about him is the "cult-ish" (ha) tone of his videos, like he's showing us the secret sauce only he knows and not a series of exercises that people have been doing for decades but fell out of fashion.

I'm not impressed by his boasting at all and I've seen similar advice to his on many channels.

Why does that matter exactly?

His advice is good for one (albeit common) type of knee injury. It's a bit annoying he think he's solved all people's knee issues. Or, I guess it's just so everyone will buy his program.

It also irks me how he sometimes play into a "big pharma" kinda conspiracy. That "everyone" says you shouldn't have knees in front of toes, but he is the single person looking through this ruse and selling you the secret.

FWIW I've had patellar tendonitis before, and the rehab I got was doing eccentric squats on an inclined surface, explicitly to get my knees over the toes and help put a balanced load on the tendon. So his "secret" has been the common approach for at least a decade.

But my experience is concordant with the submitted article: always being told to keep the knees over the toes. I don’t know what this has to do with big Pharma and it’s not a conspiracy, but it seems to have achieved common knowledge status and needs to be changed.

not sure what videos you watched, but he has plenty of videos citing his sources of work done in the 70s and 80s. He also recommends far more and varied movements than the split squat.

Since this is HN, does anyone know of new advances in cartilage repair? I just a deep cartilage defect in my femur at the knee joint because one stupid squash game. Reading about osteoarthritis is so depressing. Take care of your knees!

Nutrition and regular movement. Don't worry, you'll be fine, had a similar thing a few years ago, all gone. Be careful about surgeries, last time I checked the consensus seemed to be converging on that in this case they're largely placebos.

Depending on how far off the deep-end you want to go, you can look into: peptides (BPC-157, TB-500), Human Growth Hormone and Platelet-Rich Plasma injections (PRP). There might be more stuff out there now, it's been a few years since I looked into it for a SLAP tear in my shoulder.

If you are in the USA, look into "anti aging" or "longevity" clinics. It's basically gymbro MD's that will prescribe you that stuff for money. Then at least you can be fairly certain that you know what you're injecting. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of the dodgy websites/alibaba for acquiring the stuff.

Obviously there is no definitive proof that the stuff works or if it's safe, otherwise it would be significantly more common. You can google, there are many small scale studies done on those compounds of varying degrees of quality. It all depends on your risk-tolerances etc. Ideally you'd be somewhere in the US near one of those clinics and could speak to a real doctor about your options, and not a random idiot from hackernews :D.

BPC-157 is your best shot, have loads of experience with it and nothing but good things to say.

Have also used TB-500, and a dozen other peptides, but for injuries there's nothing like BPC.

Unfortunately the feds are starting to crack down both SARMs and Peptides so they aren't as easy to get as they were 5 years ago =/

There are two mainstream competing methods – microfracturing and autologous transplantation of osteochondral stem cells ("autologous" meaning "from you" as opposed to "from someone else"l this procedure is sometimes called OAT – osteochondral autologous transplantation) – that can be applied if you have a focal defect. There is good evidence that both are better than doing nothing. By "good evidence" I mean "a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed randomised clinical trials" – see [1] for microfracturing and [2, 3] for OAT. I would argue that there is no clear winner.

I had a bucket-handle tear of my right lateral meniscus, chondromalacia patellae grade 3 and a patellar tendinopathy. I was operated on for these about a year ago and am only really just able to walk again. I also have at least two herniated and seven prolapsed spinal discs with cord moulding and neuropathy and neurological symptoms.

Videos like this make me feel a bit sick, to be honest.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00264-011-1364-x [2] https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.10... [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arthro.2016.05.038

Similar situation here. Trying to go without surgery.

Doctors said my partial ACL tear wouldn't heal. They were wrong. But it took a lot of rehab and learning new movement patterns.

They're saying the same thing now. I'm hoping it's another case of, statistically these things don't heal because people don't change their movement patterns, not because it's impossible.

Besides a light brace, stretching and massage, I am taking collagen supplements. Considering PRP.

Good luck with your journey!

It seems like most doctors and your average physical therapist, lack the knowledge on what can be achived with a conservative approach. Just google what knee injury Connor McDavid (Arguably the best and most dynamic player in the NHL) had, and the sucessful non-surgical rehab protocal he went through. Most of his doctors were pressuring him to go the surgical route.

I was way too heavy when I started getting fit again so squats hurt my knees and I frequency lost balance. Switching to supported squats with a table and executing them really slowly worked wonders [1]. Now my legs are strong again and some weight has come off, my form for unsupported bodyweight squats is great and I can do dozens without joint pain.

[1[ advice in Wade's convict conditioning programme.

If you're doing ATG squats and you're over, say, 5'10"ish (though there's skeletal variation), it's impossible to do a squat without the knees going over the toes (simply because of the proportions of your femur to your tibia). I'm pretty sure this myth started on idiotic bro-science forums like bodybuilding.com or the like.

On the contrary, there is absolutely no way this started on bodybuilding.com. Even a quick Google search attributes Karl Klein with this brilliant myth

Supposedly started with this study from 1978: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Kinetics-of-the-parall...

I was wondering why I had never heard of this advice, and it's because I started lifting in a powerlifting focused circle so the advice was always hips back, weight on the heel. We also only go past parallel in depth, we can get impressively deep but you don't tend to see that transitional moment where the body shape changes and weight shifts to get ATG. There is also no way I would want to be in that transitional phase with the amount of weight powerlifting asks of you, I think you'd be pretty compromised with the low bar squat.

I have never had trouble with my knees using powerlifting technique. My first injury was actually when I tried to transition into a general strength focus and started doing highbar squats, it was probably just my lack of experience with highbar and an overconfidence from my previous lifting lowbar, but I tweaked my back. It took over a year to recover fully.

Excellent video that discusses how different body types reflect how you can do squats - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av3LO2GwpAk

The simple thing that I think is missing here is that you can squat in an upright position with your knees in front of your toes or with your torso forwards with your shins vertical (or anywhere in between). And both are okay! What you can't do is vertical shins and vertical torso! As you sit more upright, your knees have to go forwards (past your toes) for balance.

Kelly Starrett: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QJ36zMt5bc

Two things I have found that improve my squat technique are:

- 1. Push the sacrum-point as far back as possible for the entire movement, keeping your back straight. I have found this reduces the number of things I am focusing on and seems to be comfortable.

- 2. Focus on explosive-like movement from the bottom. I find exerting my effort at the bottom of the squat to the first 20% of the lift creates momentum, and avoids slow and unnatural pauses which seems to cause me injuries.

I always heard the guidance to not put knees beyond toes in the context of kung fu - that it won't hurt you when you are young, but that avoiding it will force you to practice proper stances and gain the correct strength and flexibility when you are young, so that poor technique doesn't become habit and you will remain strong into old age.

I have zero actual science or research behind that guidance - it is just what I was taught. But it does make me wonder if that would be a better way to explain it - not to avoid injury but purely as a marker of proper technique. (And clearly, weight lifting has different markers than kung fu.)

I inherently distrust places that aren't academically recognized but try to imply they have academic credentials.

"Squat University"

Bunch of rubbish.

This has been posted by the same guy repeatedly every 6 months for the past 5 years. Shilling for clicks.

I think you inherently distrust something else, perhaps places that don’t look like they were created for nerds.

The man behind Squat University and the author of this article is Dr. Aaron Horschig who has a PhD in physical therapy and a bachelors in exercise science. He also wrote the Squat Bible with over 1000 5* reviews on Amazon. He’s trained many world class athletes including multiple World’s Strongest Man winner Martins Licis. Aaron is known for being a leading expert in sports science.

I only do squats with a safety squat bar and elevated heels. The SSB helps prevent injuries and the elevated heels allows me to sink very low into the squat. Because of the reduced risk of injury, I could squat confidently far more often with more weight and see much better gains in strength and size. After a certain age, learning to do exercises while minimizing risk of injuries becomes a much higher priority if you plan to continue working out for a long time. Seen too many people mess up their backs with barbell squats.

SSBs are awesome (I bought one), especially for us computer touchers. Doing proper squats with a SSB requires a lot of thoracic extension which helps counteract the bunching we do all day. Thoracic mobility tends to suck in desk-bound people and it can contribute to a host of mobility issues throughout the rest of the body.

Same. I always shake my head when I see people at the gym use the power rack to squat _outside of the rack with no safety rails_. It's slightly less annoying to see than those who use the rack to do curls, but it's still annoying to see.

I also do bench presses with safety rails. still get full upper body activation but significantly minimize the chance of a tweaked back. also lets me bench heavier since i don't need to worry about getting a spot.

I lift weights, recreationally and that immediately sounded bogus to me. One has to keep the center line of the mass over the middle of the feet. I can squat without knees going over toes and maintain that maybe up to a point where thighs are horizontal, by leaning forward with a bar. Past certain point, in a deep squat, no amount of upper body hinge allows me to maintain proper center of mass and knees go over toes to compensate.

Yes, that dogma is wrong and outdated. What matters is a full-functioning healthy body, not preconceived notions such as that.

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