 What do you do when you're shifting, when you're squatting? So what this looks like, as I come down, I probably don't even have to fake it because I do it so naturally, as I come down, some people will shift into their side like this, this way is really easy for me to do. It's a little bit harder for me to do it this way. And I would venture to guess that most people are going to feel that way, even if you have a left-looking shift. Generally, you don't have a left turn at your hips. You see how if I were wearing a belt, my belt buckle would be pointing this way. That's because of our asymmetry in our anatomy. Everyone's like this, okay? It's really normal to be really good at turning and shifting to the right side. So what's going on here? Now, fixing a hip shift. Sometimes you can just kind of cue yourself to keep your hips forward. I don't like that ideally because it turns this hopefully unconscious squatting fundamental movement into something that's a lot more conscious and that will slow you down and it will limit your ability to be strong and to develop force and power and demonstrate your abilities. So if I do see someone shifting this way, I think it's helpful for you, the listener, whether you're a coach or you're coaching yourself to understand the anatomy that's going into this. So we're gonna say normally we shift to the right. So what muscles are doing that? Right inner thigh pulls me over. Left butt pushes me over, okay? If I was shifting to the left, it'd be left inner thigh pulling me over, right butt pushing me over, okay? Now, those can contribute in any sort of proportion. The key is to try both and figure out how to get both at the same time. Now there's a couple of ways we can do this. So if I'm shifting, I can try to bias myself into the other shift and say, okay, I want you to shift over this way. Find that little inner thigh muscle on this left side and I want you to hang on to it while you squat. That's kind of like the most basic, easy to implement change that you could possibly try. And that's a lot of times where I'll start. So squat down a little bit. I want you to shift your right knee forward, your left knee back, keep that left knee in a little bit. That's kind of counter to some of the things that we hear often as keep your knees out, but keeping your knee out will keep this adductor off, this inner thigh muscle off. So we have to keep it in a little bit, okay? I don't want it falling in like this, but I do want some, okay? Now, do you feel that inner thigh? Yes, good. Come on down slowly and come back up. Now it'll feel like you're shifting a lot and it'll feel wrong and that's okay because you were shifting the other way a lot. This then becomes a sort of reeducation tool, a new way to teach you how to do this, okay? And when you get to the point where it becomes a little bit more automatic, then you don't think about it, right? We're just gonna say I'm pushing my feet in the ground the whole time that I squat, okay? And hopefully I can maintain those positions. So that's the way to cue yourself out of it. What might I try if that doesn't work? Well, what do we gotta do? We gotta turn on the right butt muscle and we gotta turn on the left inner thigh muscle. So anything that brings my left knee in and anything that brings my right knee out is a good way to attack those things. And if I can get them at the same time, that's maybe ideal. I might have someone, let's try this, I'm gonna lay down on the ground here, impromptu, I might try something like this where I lay on the ground. I shift the right knee forward and I try to find this right butt muscle and I feel a little bit of it, right? I pull this left hip up towards my left shoulder. So I got this little tunnel and I can put a little toy train track. You know, like Christmas time, you got the Christmas tree and you put the toy train around the Christmas tree. It's gonna come right under here, under here, right? So that gives me my left ab. Right knee is forward, right knee is up. As long as I have my left ab and I push my right foot down, there we go, I can feel my right glute. So that's step one, I got one of these. This might be enough to fix your shift. If it's really amplified, it's probably not gonna be enough. So you're gonna wanna go to the next level. You're gonna wanna bring this left knee up as well. Okay, so I got the right glute still and now I got this left inner thigh. I'm trying not to get the quad. Okay, if you feel like it's on the quad and it's not on the inner thigh or in the groin area, you don't feel anything in your knee, something like that, then you may need to shift, okay? You may need to tuck your hips this way, round your back out. That'll help turn on this lower ab and secure you that way. Okay, this is just one of my favorite starting points. It's not gonna train you a whole lot and it doesn't always transfer well to squatting. So it's important that after you do that, after, ooh, I can kind of feel this and I can kind of feel this butt muscle back here. I'm gonna try to hang on to them now. Now that they're tired, now that they're sore, I'm gonna say, okay, you know what those feel like. Now let's squat down. Boom, okay? And it should feel a little bit more effortless. It should feel hard to do correctly but not overly challenging. It's not like we're overloading you. It should even feel a little bit easier as long as you can maintain it. The hard part then is the learning component. You have to be able to hang on to this for the rest of your training days as long as you're interested in squatting without a hip shift. If you wanna squat with a hip shift, you could probably use a little bit more weight, at least in the moment and maybe you don't need to change anything. An example would be like a powerlifting meet when all I'm trying to do is demonstrate my maximum strength, my lift the most amount of weight that I can in one given day. I would say that hip shifting, in this case, if I'm prone to doing it, is probably going to help me lift more weight in the short term but it's not a long term solution. So take it with a grain of salt there. Take that little advice. Take that shift with a grain of salt and consider that maybe during your training, it isn't about using as much weight as you possibly can. It's about working in a position that you can maintain for long periods of training.