You Don't Know Squat....



If you think the human knee never goes over the toe, or never should go over the toe.

Thanks to Vern G for bringing up the knee topic. This IS one of the major problems in athletic development in this country. This myth is propagated by most every physical therapist, personal trainer and strength coach in this country. My mother could probably spout it back to me if I asked the right questions.

The whole thing started with a research (and I'll use the term very loosely with this) article by a Dr. Karl Klein in 1961.

Everyday, people young and old are told this myth. And slowly but surely, we are becoming a nation of people who have ZERO leg strength and lower exremity mobility. And our back health SUFFERS because of it. What is even worse, is that many strength coaches and fitness professionals are teaching young athletes to squat by using this cue: Sit your butt back and stay on your heels.

First, no athlete moves, jumps--does ANYTHING from their heels. Second, this does put higher loads on the lumbar spine. Third, it perpetuates poor lower extremity flexibility.

I'll talk more in a future post about my personal style of teaching squats. But for now, feel free to go here to access a Terry Todd opinion/historical article on Dr. Klein and the whole subject, as well as see a recent study by Dr. Andy Fry and his group on torso inclination/knee position while squatting. Scroll down to the Documents box. This Fry article is the one Vern refers to in the referenced post.

P.S. The lifter in the second picture is Peter Kelly, multiple-time US Olympian. Pete tore an ACL skiing and had no trouble coming back to competitive lifting. Let's see, I wonder what kind of results we would come up with if we compared the number of knee ligament injuries from skiing vs squatting/competitive lifting....

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit...
Read more

Strength: Overcoming Tradition & Assumptions

Image
The term "strength" comes with many images and stereotypes. The most common stereotype usually includes intimidating men who look like action figures, in spaces that look like iron jungles. Strength is associated with mass gain, limb girth increases, muscle hypertrophy and maximal force production against an external load. With regard to lower body strength, we speak in terms of multiples of bodyweight (BW), with the ratio of 2x BW historically viewed as necessary and desirable. We have historically trained in terms of 1 RM. There has been a trend recently to adopt a VBT (velocity based training) approach, as we know 1 RM changes on a daily basis and technology now allows us to more finely tune things with velocity as the target within each set. These things can be helpful as we initially learn to measure and document progress. But I think it is important to step back from this narrow outlook, because this view of strength does not serve all of us well, in either the rehab or...
Read more