 The one piece of information that gives you the most Decision-making power when you're watching a squat or when you're coaching a squat is Your feet Okay, it's not your knees. We talk about knees a lot because we want knees to be healthy We talk about backs a lot because we want backs to be healthy But I can get the most information by watching what your feet do Let's say scenarios. Okay, so The most common thing that people mess up is they fall forward Okay, and they might not do it on every rep and it might not be there the whole time They might just be okay and then shift forward Like that or they might just stay there the whole time and squat down forward with a lot of pressure on their toes If I look at my feet while I do this, I know that I don't need to see the rest of the person to be able to diagnose that So if you're lifting with yourself, you can film yourself and watch your feet You can even do a close-up on your feet and see okay Well, I can I can tell what point of the lift that I'm in because I'm towards the bottom And I see my ankle is forward, but I also see that it's a little too far forward and my heel starts to rise up off the ground That's an indication that I'm shifting forward or I can just watch right I can say oh It looks like your heels getting light and it looks different in shoes shoes kind of Disguise everything, but you can still see it very well. You can even see toes rising up and maybe we'll talk about that so common errors in squatting shifting forward heels come up off the ground so make sure your heels stay on the ground Second thing let's talk about over biasing inward So with the forward weight shift that we get commonly We also tend to have because the joints adopt this position We also tend to have a collapse in the feet like this and the knees come in just like this So I've got a lot of pressure on the inside of my ankles and on my arch here. My arch is flat against the ground And I'm not maintaining my posture of my squat with Active tissue. I'm relying on ligamentous and joint support to hold my body up to create this force and If we think about this right Ligaments don't recover like muscles recover muscles have a really awesome blood supply ligaments do not So if we're lifting with longevity in mind We want to be squatting down with as much muscular effort as we possibly can and as little Joint and ligamentous and passive tissue tension as possible So we talked about shifting forward We talked about the knees coming in so I can look at the feet and I can say oh look at that His bunion looks worse or I can say oh look at that his feet are flat Sometimes these people actually have flat feet and they need help with their feet and you should watch some of my other videos about that But sometimes it's just because they're falling forward and it's just because their knees are falling inward They need a little bit of glutes to support them. They need a little bit of hamstring to bring them back Okay, so my feet tell me that my feet tell me i'm shifting forward My feet tell me i'm collapsing inward and oftentimes those things go together So you may have to fix them both at the same time Now Let's go outward. So what if I'm holding myself out like this? You see this a lot in people who have read things on the internet, but are probably not my things on the internet As they come down They shift to the outsides of their feet their knees go way out because they heard you're supposed to keep your knees out To keep your knees healthy. What I would say is you're probably aligning the knee pretty well Maybe you're doing it too much and you're not aligning the knee well This this is probably pretty good. Let's do this This is pretty good. This is way too much Okay, and you can see how the the forces that go through my ankle now are not stacked on my ankle They're tilted out I'm actually promoting an ankle sprain like an ankle roll. Ooh, it just cracked. Ow The things I do for you Um So if the knees are being pushed out too far You'll notice the feet roll up the arches come off the ground That is actually going to shut off your glute Okay, if I keep this out, it shortens the glute, but it doesn't load it Okay, it's not there to support me if I keep my arches down as I come down Then I can really feel myself buoying out with my glute out of the bottom of the squat So we talked about falling forward talked about collapsing inward we talked about Uh collapsing outward rolling outward now the last scenario that I think these feet are really good at telling you the story of is a sort of shift now What if we had one set of knees that were going out and one set of knees that were going in What would happen? What would that look like? So let's say I'm bringing this knee inward And I'm bringing this knee outward like this So what that is is that is an ankle mechanism to shift my body weight to the right If I just line myself up this way and I turn this way if I'm trying to maximize how far back I can go My ankle has to turn too because I can get motion there if I turn all the way like this, right? And then let me bring my foot flat You see I lost like 45 degrees of rotation So the ankle is important for this And it tells me a lot about the shifting that is occurring during my squatting So if I come down and I notice one foot is maybe up like this That's telling me that it's shifting over to the right side And if the other foot is down like this, I know both feet are working together to do that Okay, so I can cue either foot Maybe I have to cue both feet But I would cue the one that is the most a load bearing So if you see the the supinated foot, right? You see the arch come off the ground like this You see the inverted ankle Those are all jargony terms that you might hear that describe this If I see these things I know that my weight is over on this right side And I'm probably going to get a little bit more out of my cueing if I address the weight bearing side So let's say I want you to push through the arch of your foot Just like this and that shifts me over a little bit And if I'm still pushing with the other foot, then it's time to cue that And that'll bring me back over and that'll unlock some of this extra mobility extra position sense Okay, so recap we talked about falling forward Heels come up off the ground like this. Sometimes they come way up off the ground. Sometimes they just get light, right? A good cue for that push through your heels the whole time Sometimes the knees collapse in And you got a lot of pressure on the inside of the foot Again a good cue for that push through the heels I want you to sink back into your heels while you go because this forward shift is very much associated with this knee collapse Sometimes you have the knees outward too much and you might just need to say keep your feet flat Push the insides of your feet down And then finally if you have some sort of asymmetry where one foot is coming out The other foot is rolling inward you may need to address each independently And I wouldn't necessarily cue them all right away You might want to just stick with one practice it for a week and then go from there One final note the Cue the overall Picture that I'm looking for if I'm if I'm sitting here and I'm only looking at your feet And I can't see the rest of your body squatting. What I want is what we might call a tripod foot arrangement Where my weight is evenly dispersed between right here under my big toe right here under my pinky toe and my heel Okay, if I do that that means i'm maintaining my center of balance right if my center of balance moves To the outside then I lose the big toe part of it vice versa All of these things so look out for that tripod foot look out for those three points of contact and just think about keeping Your feet flat while you're doing your lifts