Squatting Knees Over Toes (THE TRUTH!)

If you squat you have likely been told to never let your knees go past your toes. If you do, you will likely damage your knees, tendons and integrity of your joints. In this video, I’m going to tell you the truth about squatting knees over toes and break down the biomechanics of the squat exercise

what’s up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx. com so today we’re going to talk about whether or not once and for all your knees should be going past your toes when you squat we’ve heard all kinds of advice here what is the right advice so let me demonstrate a couple scenarios here first of all we know knees over toes can look a few different ways number one it could look like this okay we’re not talking about that we’ll get back to that in a second that’s a squat you guys should know how I feel about that the next version would be something that looks like this where your knees are clearly past the toes here and then the last version is one where the knees aren’t allowed to go past the toes ice it back more and I’m in this position here okay now which one is right actually only one of them is really right the first one we know is not the second one is the one we’re often told not to do and if third one is the one that were actually told to do well I’m gonna flip it around for you because the one of the movies should be doing is the one in the middle you’re supposed to let your knees go past your toes and a properly executed squat with proper biomechanics here’s why let me pull out this band here for a second and I’m gonna bring in Jesse for a minute oh no no no we just get your hands in this no Jesse in this I didn’t mean a hand in Troy I just said your hands that’s it demo how about a hand down well that’s all so let’s pretend that this is your knee right here all right this is your femur from the top there’s your tibia from the bottom all right now we put the patellar tendon over the top here alright and what we do is if we were to squat with just the knee doing the motion here right moving forward like I was doing before you can see that there’s a lot of tension placed here in the middle of this band right we don’t want that because that’s compressing downward on to the kneecap give you like that shooting stabbing pain that you’re familiar with if you have any type of discomfort when you squat if I were to go the other way and I were to just go back and sit back hit the hips once again I’ve created a whole hell of a lot of tension here right here in the middle but if I’m in this position right I’ve created some backwards motion here too croute my hips and glutes which we’ll talk about in a second and so important but then I actually allow the tibia to move forward that way look where it does it actually now displaces that force right here at the front of the knuckle right to the front of the tibia it flattens out the forces that were being compressed and directed right here to the kneecap that’s important because we want to do anything we can to avoid those compressive forces on the kneecap because we want to actually allow the kinetic chain that we actually have in our legs here to do what it’s supposed to do meaning start generating force here in the upper leg transmitted it through the kneecap the joint here which is the the Depot for this train and then go down that track on the other side continue through the train station to the other side which is the tibia if we don’t give this transmission to force up and down we’re going to be at big trouble here when it comes to actually the pain that we feel in the kneecap because all the force we generate here get stuck here and it has no outlet to get out of here so what do we do well I talked about in many videos how important it is to allow the glutes to actually participate because we know that when you get and sit back you’re getting the biggest muscles in your body here to be able to participate in the squat the extension of the hips by the glutes is going to give us a lot of power out of the hole especially if you’re squatting to the depth you should be but you need to allow those tibias to go forward those needs to travel forward for the reasons I just told you so that you get the ability to take the force that’s generated through here and allow it to travel and go past the knee don’t let it get stuck here go past the knee and the only way you can do that is by allowing those two beers to travel forward well when we when we get here we say well how do we do this well a lot of times we’re actually unable to do this because we don’t have either the flexibility in the calf and the Achilles tendon back here to allow for a dorsal flexion or we get stuck on the front side here where we feel like we kind of hit a wall which is a mechanical bony block that can benefit from immobilization actually have a whole video that I talked about how to do this and I’ll make it at the end of the video if you haven’t seen it already in case you’re feeling the tightness and the front of the ankle as opposed to the back but either way free your tibia let them travel the way they’re supposed to go and the muscle that helps you to do that is the anterior tip you can see here what it does it actually creates that dorsiflexion of the ankle it actually pulls the ankle up when my foot is free to move but if my foots in contact with the ground like it is when I squat the movement will actually pull the tibia forward from the top right it’s just a relative motion which way are we looking at it from so we want to be able to let it do that well I have a tip for you an activation tip as you go down into a squat you’ve probably been told that you want to push down hard through the little toe the big toe and the heel to kind of create that tripod force downward I’m going to disagree with that I think that you should be pushing down through the mid foot which is this black lace right here the last lace on my shoe through here push down on the outside the inside of the heel but let these toes move and if you actually pull up on your toes as you go down while keeping contact with the mid foot in the ground you’re actually going to facilitate this anterior displacement of the tibia you’re going to give yourself some of this dorsiflexion which will relieve the kneecap from the stored up four sets causing all the knee pain you’re going to connect that kinetic chain so as I go down I try to pull up with the toes keeping the foot in contact with the ground so as I go down I just kind of pull up the big toe off the ground and let the rest of it travel down come up down come up down you can see the glutes are participating they’re recruited I’m just not worried about keeping my knees back here they’re allowed to go forward and up down here and come up you want to be able to make sure that you establish that stop artificially forcing yourself to stay back some people even give you the advice to put up a wall here and make sure your knees never contact the wall you don’t want to do that that’s not natural biomechanics of the lower leg you want that dorsiflexion of the the lower tibia there and you need to make sure it’s happening so try some of the things I showed you here try the tip it can actually pull up on those big toes if you have knee pain I promise you you’re gonna have a lot less instantly if you’re not somebody that struggles with knee pain the biomechanics of your squat as a whole who’ll improve which will probably allow you to actually squat more waiting in the long run oh one last thing you see this clip here of the squat that I mentioned in the beginning of the video this is for knee travel over the toes however is completely opposite than what we’re trying to talk about here this is undesirable knee forward movement we’re talking about putting ourselves in this position here we’re actually in plantar flexion at the ankle not in dorsiflexion we’re in plantar flexion and then trying to get thi