 Next question is from Johnnyfp23. What causes your knees to cave in when you squat and how do you fix this problem? You know what's funny about this question is if you asked me this question seven years ago, the answer I would have given you is different than what I would say today. Almost always the answer I would have given you before was, oh, it's coming from your hips, your abductors are over, your abductors are not strong enough, your adductors are overpowering. So in other words, your inner thighs are pulling in harder than your outer thighs can stabilize. Now I would say this, it could be that or it could be coming from your feet. When your feet cave in, when your feet flatten, you don't have good ankle stability and mobility, that can also cause your knees to cave in with a squat. So when you're doing a squat and you notice your knees have that tendency to move in, you gotta look at both. Look at your feet, that's actually where I would start, because it's at the bottom, that's the thing that connects you to the floor. Look at your feet, test your ankle mobility, am I maintaining an arch? MR is my ankle mobility limiting to the point where it makes my feet really wanna turn out because they're really, really tight because that'll cause your knees to go in. If your feet and ankles look really good, then you can move up to the hips and say, okay, maybe I can put a band around my knees, push the band around while I squat to help strengthen more stability in the abductors. This is one of my favorites to help people out with now. And to your point, Sal, like when I saw Dr. Brink, like this really like was eye-opening and we talk about paradigm shattering moments all the time, this was for me. Cause like you, I thought it was all like glute mead stuff, like stuff related to the hip and my glute mead wasn't firing enough, I didn't have good hip control and so my knees were collapsing in and I'm weak and that was everything where what I've found now, especially after it was pointed out in myself, that the breakdown was in my feet and now more so than ever, I see that first. So, and I think it's just more common because we all wear shoes all day long. Back to this question we just had, these all actually feed into each other really nicely is the, you know, if you don't have good foot strength and you just, and then you go and you train, what ends up happening is the feet flatten or pronate, they roll in and that's what makes the knee collapse in. Now, and what ends up happening when you just keep training and exercising with that issue, you just strengthen that pattern. We talked about this the other day in the podcast, like that just becomes the default pattern and you go to that. So it just gets harder to fix it if you don't learn to address it. So I always take somebody, get that person barefoot so they can see and then, you know, Brink always gives the triangle tip where if you think of your toes, all, you know, think of them like the top of, or the point of the triangle is your heel and then the top, the other side of the triangle is your pinky toe and your big toe and you're trying to keep that triangle the entire time. You're not letting those three points of contact ever come off the floor when you squat down. So thinking about that first, just that in itself will already start to keep the knee from wanting to fall in. The other thing, this is also priming, right? So that same person, I know that if your knees have been collapsing in and the feet have been flattening, I also know that you're probably not really connected to your glute meat and the glute meat is responsible for externally rotating the femur or that lateral movement side to side and that's also what will engage. If I were to stand you still or sit you in a squat and say, push your knees out, the glute meat is what kind of kicks the knees out for you. And so I know that that's dormant or like I say turned off, right? That's turned off, you're not firing it. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna take you and do tube walking before. So I'm gonna make you subprime it, get you connected to that glute meat, to that muscle that's responsible for pushing the knees out and I'm going to address the feet. Those two things alone should make a huge difference right away when you go into squatting. You're now aware of your feet being planted and not letting them roll in when you squat down and then you've also primed the glute meat and then the third thing that you may have to do if it's really bad, because sometimes this same person because of everything I just told you or the internal rotation of the femur, you also have a really tight IT. So I might foam roll your IT to relieve that to like kind of like let calm the central nervous system down. So the first thing is I'm gonna roll the IT then I'm gonna teach you control of your feet. So your feet are nice and planted on the ground and then I'm gonna prime your glute meat by doing lateral tube walks. If I do that to this person, nine times out of 10, it will address this issue and you just gotta be consistent with it. That's the most common I've probably seen with this, with that happening with the knees coming in. I have also those seen, some external rotation of the feet to also widen the base of support and then the knees compensate as a byproduct of that too. So just to do the priming is essential for these types of things and then also like carrying that into correction of your squat and being able to apply different techniques with that to push the knees out and really like gain more muscle tension within those compound movements to start to train and to program your body to make that an automatic stabilization technique that you apply. Now by the way, the reason why you don't want your knees to cave in just in case you're listening, you're like, well, what's the big deal? Over time, that'll cause problems. It's just moving the joints in ways that are suboptimal and over time. You're gonna nice groove in your knees so they're not tracking out. Yeah, and over time, you're just stressing the ligaments on the sides of the knee or you're working the hips in a way that isn't beneficial over time. And so you just develop problems and then you'll get into a position where you're like, I can't squat anymore because it hurts too much. And that's part of the reason why a lot of people don't squat because they already have this issue. It's very, very common. So squats feel bad. They feel uncomfortable. And they go to do a squat and they feel pain in their knee or they feel pain in their hips or they feel pain in their low back. And a lot of times it's related to all of what we're talking about right now. And if you could just get this person to open those hips up, gain better control, maybe foam roll the IT, but control the feet. Now all of a sudden, oh shit, I can squat. I don't feel that pain. And it feels good and you get great results from it.