 If your knee has been killing you during the split squat, well, the split squat is kind of a complicated exercise. So what I want to do is I want to outline the common mistakes that people make and how to fix them so that you can think about this a little more simplistically. And hey, if it doesn't work, stay tuned because at the end of the video I'm going to give you an extra little bonus. All right, I got Tony here. Tony has a history of knee pain so we're going to try to help him out a little bit though he kind of knows what he's doing so I'm going to have to make sure he does it bad enough. So there's four fixes that I want to look for in the split squat. The first one, Tony, if you could show us a side view of the heel coming up. So a lot of times when people come down into their split squat, they rise up, their knee pushes way forward. Can you exaggerate that a little bit more? Yeah, yeah, like that much. Yeah, and you can see there's no heel contact in the ground. And so you can rest. I don't want to burn out your knees too soon. So what you can see with this is we get a lot of this anterior chain of muscle overloading but we also get a lot more shear force in the knee which the knee doesn't like to deal with. So the cue, the fix for that is just make sure that you're keeping pressure. It sounds dumb, but keep pressure of your heel in the ground and drop straight down like you're in an elevator. Yep, and then back up and do a couple there. That's not too bad. Do me a couple more. Just a little shaky, that was much better. Yeah, that's good. Okay, you can rest. So that's number one, heel is coming up. Number two is if you're lunging and you're not loading the front leg, you tend to arch back onto the back leg too much and it's just like you're not gonna get the same quad loading effect and you're gonna overload the back quad and the back knee. So a lot of times people have pain in the trailing knee. If that's you, you might look at this. You might wanna make sure. So let's do a side view again. And as Tony comes down, he's gonna kind of lean back and he's gonna get a lot of stretch in this back leg. Really exaggerate this for me. Yeah, like that. It's almost like there's a rod through your spine and it won't let you kind of lean into it. So all I like to do for this one, to cue this one, is you wanna make sure that there's a straight line from the shoulder through the hip all the way down through the trailing knee. So Tony, give me a big exhale, bring your ribs back and just lean forward a little bit. Yep, and then come down like that. Just hang onto that. Just a slight lean, but you need to do that if you're gonna load the front leg. I like to shoot for 80% of the weight on the front leg and then 20% of the weight on the back leg. Our third mistake, if the knee collapses inward too fast, you start to lose your balance and it kind of feeds that first one we talked about where the heel comes up off the ground and you get shifted. So Tony, show us as you come down, heel's gonna rise and the knee's gonna dive right in. There we go. So what I wanna see from the front is I wanna straight line from the hip through the knee all the way down through the ankle. And so I might just cue this knee out into my hand like this, something like that. And I like to think about how am I putting pressure in the foot? I wanna make sure there's good contact of the center of the heel and I wanna make sure the inside arch of the foot is down but I need the knee to be out while I do that. That not only aligns the knee. Give me one more. Not only aligns the knee, but it also keeps your hips from shifting while you're doing this. Our fourth mistake that I see a lot is just what I like to call floppy spine. So Tony, can you turn and give us a side view on this one? So what you'll see is you gotta understand the premise of this one first. It's I need the torso to stay rigid so that this split squat can be a leg exercise. And what happens is, Tony, if you show us the back rounds on the way down and the back does the movement and then it arches on the way up, finishing the movement. So when you do something like this, you usually don't feel a whole lot of glute, especially on that front leg and you don't even feel a good stretch in the trailing like so you're not getting the mobility benefit out of that either. So what I like to say, Tony is think about being tall through the top of your head all the way down to your butt. And then maintain that at the very bottom. You should feel more stretch in the back leg when you do it that way. Yep, do a couple for me. Heel still looks good, I like that. And you can see when you get to the top, I might even cue, I want you to squeeze this butt a little bit more, kind of push it forward. Oh yeah, I just did it. I don't know if you did one more. Okay, that's good. So those are our four mistakes. Now sometimes you can nail all those cues perfectly but it may be that the tissues within your legs have a difficult time tolerating that amount of load. And so for that, we can manipulate the amount of load through the front leg by simply elevating it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have Tony set up with his left leg actually on the front box just like so. And so when Tony is on the box like this, the box shifts the weight more towards the back leg. So if you're someone who has a difficult time tolerating a lot of load into the front leg, you can offload it with the box. And so we'll set up the same thing like we did on the split squat earlier. Go ahead and get into your stance position. Another thing that I will do on this as well is I'll make sure the back knee stays nice and soft like that. And then I'm gonna have Tony shift his center of mass just a little bit forward from there. And then from there, we're gonna queue, weight through the inside heel, slowly lower on the way down and back up. Nice and slow, keeping the back knee unlocked. Cause if I lock out the back knee on top, it's gonna shift my weight a little bit too far forward. Sometimes that can be uncomfortable. Straight down, straight up just like that. Straight down, straight up. Now if it's still a bit difficult, you'll notice if you zoom in on Tony, go ahead and go again. He's losing a little bit of heel at the bottom. You can simply raise this up just a little bit more and a lot of times that will make a big difference. Thanks for watching. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you feel like you haven't quite mastered the split squat, well, I got my buddy Zach to make a video about different exercises that will help you increase the mobility that you need to execute these exercises. Sometimes you know the cues and you know how to do it, but your body just can't do it. If you feel like you might be fitting into that bucket, well then watch this video from Zach.