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One limitation I constantly run into when teaching the Power Athlete squat is the ability of young athletes to get below parallel without external rotation of the femur, valgus stress at the knee and reversion/navicular drop in the foot. A barrier I have run into is the predominance of our Olympic lifting coach, who sometimes instructs the FB players, to stress depth at any cost and a narrow stance more applicable to those that only Oly lift. Watching his kids practice their lifts makes my stomach turn. They drop to the bottom with duck feet, horrible valgus stress on the knee and grind out low weight shitty reps. The way I like to overcome these barriers was taught to me in CFFB seminar. Have the biggest, strongest athlete full squat with toes out. I take one hand, apply force to the inside of their knee like shitting a door and dump them on their ass. I ask if they would like to repeat the test and it happens again. I again ask for a repeat with either a loaded barbell on their back or to squat like I teach them. They never pick the barbell. I then proceed to demo how movement patterns cannot exist with toes out in any athletic endeavor. It always helps when you dump the gigantic D1 prospect 3 years in a row.
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I have had the most trouble with my soldiers understanding how to sit back into the squat. they all initiate the squat with just their knees and they track way over the foot. I took them all over to the lifting platform and had them stand on the edge with their feet halfway off. Then, I set them free and simply said “Squat”. two main things happened, they either fell forward because they squated the same as before or they sat back and loaded the hamstrings. Now I make them go back to that as a warm up when I see them fucking it all up. this limitation is short lived for most once they start developing the neuromuscular efficiency. Personally, as a coach, I still see things which I know is not right, with a squat, but cannot pinpoint where it is originating from or I do know what is wrong but I have trouble articulating and cueing how to fix it. Driving the knees and hips back to create a vertical shin angle and load the hamstrings is one example. I’ll tell them hips and knees back or I’ll tell them to try to touch the back of their knee to the wall. I’m more than open to other tactics and techniques for cueing and instructing.
A barrier I face is Soldiers not giving a crap about the form and only the weight on the bar. I fixed this by started every single soldier with the bar on all of their lifts. I think I have actually been decently lucky I have never had anyone directly resist or question the methods of the PA Squat.
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I like the toes off the platform approach!!. Have the soldiers initiate the movement as if sitting back into a chair, put a box or bench behind them and have them lightly touch it with their bum then drive up. I start athletes at a kitchen sink, they usually have cut outs below the cabinet to put their feet under and bring them closer to the vertical shin. Same set up as the squat, the cabinet in front of them limits knee movement forward. They lower themselves down past parallel with an upright or slightly flexed trunk and only use their hands to maintain balance. Drive up through the front of the ankle joint, not the toes or heels. Use 25 of these with warm ups. With any squat there will be some anterior pitch of the lower leg, that’s just bio-mechanics, but limiting it by being balanced between quad and hamstring mm’ is where they need to be.
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I like to platform approach as well, something I will have to try in the future. A simple thing that I have had success with is placing a PVC Pipe where I don’t want their knees to pass as they squat down. This tactile cue has worked pretty well for me. I have used the box method as well with success.
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A huge barrier to the toes forward squat is unconscious incompetence. Many athletes have never given thought as to why they squat, how they should squat or how squatting in a certain manner will benefit them. Similar to @benkuch ‘s soldiers, the squat is seen as a binary exercise: Did the bar move all the way back up to where it started before you went down? Did it have more weight on it than the next guy? Our opportunity is to imbue them with an appreciation for the ‘how’ in ‘how much’. My favorite parallel to draw (shout out to Ingo B for the pun usage) is with skiing. Even if nobody has done it, most of my athletes have seen it. I ask them to stand with their toes out and then tell me what would happen if they were in that stance while speeding down a mountain. Then I ask them to stand where they would feel stable and safe as they went down a mountain. I also find that asking people to start with their toes out and then trying standing on one leg at a time, then repeating it with toes forward is a good illustrator of the stability and power potential inherent in a toes forward stance. Every single time we teach the squat (twice per week for our novice athletes) the idea of the universal applicability of that foot orientation is driven home. It is how we burpee, box jump, land, deadlfit. Try pushing a prowler duck footed and see how you like it. Making it an obsessive part of every class experience helps with buy-in when it comes to squatting.
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I always try to make the connection with my athletes to thier sport and the tows forward position. If you are strong in a toes forward squat than you will be strong in competition, as long as you’re not a fencer. Hockey, baseball, Volleyball, football, all my athletes make that connection which is awesome, with gen. pop folks its a little bit trickier. I typically point out walking, Look at how you walk, toes out or toes forward, how SHOULD you walk? Once we have established the toes forward position and its importance in daily life, I can draw the connection between building good movement patterns in the gym/training and its relevancy to their everyday life. No one should walk like a duck.
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Nailed it with the Unconscious Incompetence as a barrier. This is our job to show them why it is important and however we can do that to get it to sink in is the approach to take. Like @menacedolan said with the example of pulling on the knee with open toes and then straight toes, or talking to the them about athletic movements on the field. Or even using fear by educating them on inherent injury risks of open toes on the field of play. Show them this video, jumping and landing with open toes while thrusting hips forward…torn acl.
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A barrier when introducing the PA toes forward stance as @benkuch and @conorwlynch mentioned is lack of body awareness(or kinesthetic sense, according to Siff page 476 in Supertraining) and lack of knowledge. Most of them have squatted, most of them have seen it and most of them have no clue how to do it right(unconscious, incompetence). I’ve been using references to other sports. I like the skiing one Conor used, but to relate it to people that have not played a field sport I use the how do you ride your bike? Knees out toes out? How do you ride a horse? Knees out toes out? When they see the connection or how ridiculous those sound they start to get it. Mostly is when they have a heavy barbell on their back. I also get the I’m not going low enough feeling. To that I say: how low is enough and start talking about limiting factors like shoulder girdle stability, trunk flexion or extension and lack of stability in general rather than depth on the squat(because most of them are already breaking parallel and engaging posterior chain).
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<span id=”docs-internal-guid-21945871-3796-d8d8-65bf-d24a815c97d2″><span style=”font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: #000000; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent;”>One of the biggest problems I have had to deal with in implementing the PA style toes forward squat is that because it feels “weird” or “different” people are immediately adverse to it, and if I can convince them, which I usually do, to stick with it than we begin addressing the areas of concern; external rotation, anterior tilt, shoulder flexibility/grip on the bar… A lot of times i’m working on these things simultaneously as we re-tool the squat. Attacking hip mobility, shoulder mobility, trunk strength, etc, as well as squatting regularly. So the squat becomes more than just a bilateral hip hinge where the measure of success is point A-point B… THe squat becomes the bilateral hip hinge and everything that surrounds it and allows the athlete to complete it correctly. I find that almost no one is prepared, from day one, to correctly execute the squat this way. My athletes and clients become frustrated with the fact that to successfully complete the PA style squat you must strengthen the trunk, strengthen the adductors and abductors, strengthen the shoulder girdle, especially when every jamoke around them is just dropping down and standing up like everything is all good. BUT, every single person I have worked with tells me that after this initial phase, once the movement pattern is learned, they feel stronger, more stable, and powerful implementing the PA style vs the typical toes out, rounded upper back Hip Hinge deadlift/squat style we see. </span></span>
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When working with my field sport athletes one of the biggest limitation I have pick up on recently is the navicular drop that occurs during the squat. My fixes have been first to see if it is simply just them not engaging properly and start with the cue of “grab the ground with your toes and screw your feet into the ground.” or “pull the earth apart with your feet.” If this doesn’t solve the problem I introduce the physio boards to them and have the go through the power ankle protocol. I have had a lot of success with that fixing the issue.
One of the biggest barriers I have is with the toes forward, and this usually comes from my general population clients not my athletes. My solution is to pull out whoever is the strongest guy or girl in the class and use the the force bleed demo so show the strength and weakness of the two positions.
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A limitation of many of my general pop clients and more and more young athletes as well is that an externally rotated position tends to be their default position. The barrier to this is that they don’t understand it’s importance.They stand toes out, walk toes out, etc. So a toes forward position when squatting may be too drastic right out of the gate to achieve any success. Our solutions to this will be going through the competency model by constant reinforcement. Making corrections during unloaded movements such as deadbugs, walking, standing, burpees, etc. Then gradually bringing the toes in degrees at a time with every squat session until the toes forward position reaches the level of Unconscious Competence.
Another issue I have come across is working with taller athletes and them being able to keep their bar path consistent throughout the distance they need to travel in their squats. When working with someone who is 6’8″ with a 7’3″ wingspan they have a much tougher time with the squat in general. A solution I have found that has helped is using the safety squat bar and going to a barrier for depth, these guys are much more comfortable with this. Anyone else have any suggestions on this?
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I too work with fixing my gen pop class degrees at a time. I agree many people’s default (standing, walking, etc.) is toes out and to tell them toes forward out of the gate is mind blowing. I stress that it’s our goal to squat toes forward and constantly work to that end. My line, “toes forward as mobility allows”.
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My biggest obstacle is getting people to understand it’s not about the number it about doing it correctly, I think @conorwlynch referred to this as well. It’s especially hard when the come from another gym that focuses on a number rather than position. It’s hard for someone to swallow their pride and strip weight off of the bar and work to improve their squat technique, “But I can squat 300#”, my response “No you can’t and no offense it looks shitty”. We tend to squat a lot in my gym and once they realize they can handle the volume because they’re doing it correctly, ie their knees or back don’t hurt, buy in is achieved. My long time members have learned to love the squat and the majority do so with as toe forward as they can give me.
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