 Today's video on squatting is going to be a little bit more advanced than most of the other videos that I've made What I'm doing here is I'm trying to talk more of the mechanics more of the specifics more of the anatomy That's going on here so that you people trying to help other people or trying to help your own special situation Can understand what happens when there's weird stuff going on a little anecdote when I was growing up I read a lot of articles on t-nation or whatever and they said extend your back Drive thoracic extension. They said push your knees out and all that stuff Kind of messed me up kind of a lot because I took it too far, right? I didn't treat it for what it's worth. I didn't understand what it was worth And so what I'm trying to do here is educate you so that you have options in your training so that you understand How to make your own decisions? Today specifically in this video. We're talking about the knee What is required of the knee so? In a squat as I squat down. I need knee flexion. I'm going to try to be flexible here Me flexion, right? That's when the soft tissues my calf comes into my hamstring, right? I probably don't need to define that for you because this is an advanced video So let's move on. I need knee flexion. What else do I need for knee flexion? Well, I need tibial internal rotation, which is femoral external rotation Okay Relative motion is very important here because relative motion describes everything we can't Say that we understand something in isolation Because it's all part of this bigger thing So as I flex the knee the knee needs to internally rotate, right? I'm going to do both so you can see which side I'm doing if I'm looking at me I flex the knee and it internally rotates slightly Likewise, the opposite happens as I extend the knee as it locks out. There's this Screw-home Mechanism that externally rotates the tibia slightly Okay, and that locks the tibia into place Bad things happen when that is interfered with or when it happens too soon But suffice to say if I don't have full knee extension I'm gonna have trouble locking myself out at the top of the squat. And so I might not have trouble. Let's let's kind of Be my own divils. I have the kit so This person squatting probably does not feel it if they do they're they're very aware of themselves and Either congratulations or good luck because sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing It has its difficulties, let's say so when I Extend to my knee at the top both knees extend and if one Extends but the other one can't quite get there. I'm going to turn Into the side that can't quite get there. I'm going to use the extension on the other side Find maybe a little bit more and I'm gonna rotate to compensate for my lack of extension That's cool So if you see a hip shift at the top it could be the knee and I'm not gonna say it's always a knee But if you had somebody who had ACL reconstruction Maybe like my friend Lucas Dunham who I'm trying to get to start a YouTube channel Maybe he had bad ACL post ACL reconstruction rehab Not because he had a bad doctor, but because he had a bad patient Maybe you don't have that motion anymore. And so if I try to squat ATG but to heels And I don't have this this motion then or Sorry, I forgot we're talking about extension So if I don't have this extension, I'm gonna rotate Lucas doesn't have flexion So if he comes to the bottom and he doesn't have that flexion, he's got to find a way around it It's got to find another way to get depth And so he is a power lifter and he can you know squat about 500 pounds And so when he comes all the way down Once he doesn't have the knee flexion once the knee can't come down he has to find a way around it and Because he lifts heavy. He is not twisting a whole lot as his compensation What he is doing is he's letting his heel come up off the ground to get him that extra flexion Okay, he gets it out of his ankle so that his knee doesn't have to bend anymore It's really interesting, but and it's one of those things that you're not going to see in that many people You're not going to know the cause you might see something very very similar Maybe exactly similar to this in anybody that you work with but the cause will be different The cause is not always I don't have full knee flexion and honestly it usually isn't full knee flexion is a full like soft tissue approximation, so you're you're Basically, you're pinching the the calf and the hamstring together if that is what is limiting your knee flexion you have full knee flexion if You lay someone on their stomach and you bend their knee and it really twists themselves Or if you just lay them on their back and you bend their knee and you just try to feel when it stops That can tell you How much motion they have So in this case, I'm using this isolation to give me a better picture of what's happening So the only way that you know, let's think about like a picture that you might take And upload digitally It's a bunch of pixels, right? It's a grid of pixels and as As our computers get better and better the pixels get more and more plentiful but I don't I don't see the picture if I zoom in All I see is the detail But I need to know what color each pixel is if i'm going to recreate This picture right if i'm going to fully mimic this picture if i'm going to have a really good idea of what this picture is Okay, if I stay zoomed out. I only have an approximation I only know that his heel comes up when he squats. I don't know why And sometimes it's okay to not know why as long as you have a workaround for him He's uh, he's a little stubborn. So he's hard to address Occasionally and so he still wants to power lift. So we got to find a way around it somehow Um knee motion again recap at the top to extend the tibia needs to externally rotate Look for that. What does that mean at the femur? I'm not going to answer it I want you to understand what it is Then at the bottom flexion I need internal rotation of those Um Tibia And what does that mean that the femur is doing? I'm doing it with my hands kind of and i'm giving you the answer But I want you to understand you should be able to do that Like that that's a drop of a hat And so I think that's the most that I want to say about knee motion in squatting If you have any questions if you have any other weird cases that you need help with Shoot me an email and we'll you know, we'll discuss or even better yet. Just leave a comment below so everyone else can see it Thanks for listening