 I want to talk about a squat mistake that pretty much nobody talks about. So one cue that everyone uses is to stay back on your heels while you're squatting. Oftentimes, people will fall forward when they're squatting and they need to shift their weight back either at the bottom of their squat or throughout the entire thing. One thing that I think I believe differently than many other people is that you can go too far back. So if I shift my weight back to the posterior part of my heel, the very back of my shoe, then my toes start coming up like this. Okay? Now I can feel pressure on my heels in the ground but I don't think that is a more stable position for me. I think a more stable position is one of a flat foot with a contact throughout the ground where I'm pushing through the base of my big toe, the base of my pinky toe, and my heel and my arch and everywhere else on my foot that I can find, right? I don't want my toes to be clawing up through my shoes. Hopefully you can see that. I want my feet flat and I want to be able to push through anything. This shift your weight back cue is good for a lot of people. So I don't want to say that we never need to use that but I do want to just illustrate to you that it's possible to go too far. Okay? So don't go too far. With this posterior weight shift, what you'll notice is that the toes start to come up and so what that does is it turns on the fronts of the shin and you might feel the front of your shin get tired while you're doing your squats and it seems inexplicable. It's just because those muscles are not relaxing. Now if we take this back and we think about or we take a step back and we think about maybe like Tai Chi or maybe some longer term, more proven methods of mobility exercise or movement training. We see this emphasis on staying rooted in the ground. I tell a lot of my clients that I want your feet to be like tree roots in the ground so that you can deal with any sort of force. Even if you're just squatting like this, I want you to be prepared to be pushed in the shoulder, cross the face or something. I don't know. This allows me to then react. It gives me a wider base of support and therefore more stability and that allows me to adjust my stance and this is I think the long-winded explanation of what functional exercise actually is. If I can get really strong this way with my heels way back down and my toes coming up off the ground, my butt back, hips back, chest up, kind of queuing during my squats, I might be able to lift more weight in the gym but it's not really transferring to the rest of my life. If it doesn't help me resist the wind blowing outside and it doesn't because you're doing your squat on two points of contact that are your heels, then what good is it really doing for you? So I would challenge you if you notice yourself squatting and your toes come up off the ground then just cue yourself. Keep my feet flat, push through the arches of my feet and come back up. One distinction that I think is easy to miss. I exaggerate this mistake to illustrate it to you but it can be very subtle and it does pretty much the same thing because the nervous system that your brain and your spinal cord is what's telling your body where you're at, how stable you are and therefore allowing your muscles to work or restricting them from working. So your posterior weight shift could just look like this. That might be too subtle to even see on camera but what I generally notice is people's toes start pointing up in the toe box of their shoe. Okay it doesn't look like they're falling over it just looks like their toes are desperately trying to find some stability for their foot. So keep an eye on that look closely the details matter.