Squats and Knees

Training Powerlifting
41

[quote]jmb9286 wrote:
romanaz wrote:
since when is knees over toes dangerous? Not allowing your ankles to flex is dangerous to the knee joint! Your promoting inflexibility!

and look @ how all people in china or third world countries w/o chairs squat! Looks ass to grass to me!

deeper is better.

You should be pushing your ass back when you squat. If your knees move out past your toes, a shearing force is created, which places great stress on the meniscus, patellar ligament, and ACL. All of my professors, athletic trainers, and doctors have told me this. Every one of these people have a Ph.D in exercise science, athletic training, or exercise physiology. If you don’t believe me, wait until you are sixty years old and tell me how your knees and ankles feel from all those years of squatting with poor technique.[/quote]

sorry, but I go by real world results over what a lab doctor will tell me. I’m an Olympic lifter and I see EVERYONE in OL catchs cleans and snatchs, and squats with knees way over toes. Do any of us have knee problems outside of circumstances not related to knees over toes? No. In fact, my knees feel so much better letting them over my toes and squatting ass to grass. Back when I was powerlifting and not letting them go over, my knees would kill me for days after squating.

When I am 60, I expect my knees to not feel good. I’ll have many years of lifting on them and of course things will break down. Plus, I’m flat footed, I’m destined to have pain in the knees.

When you drop down into the squat, you go DOWN by starting with the knees moving, and as you go UP you start by pushing your ass up and back. When there is an actual load on the knees, for the most part, the knees dont stay over the toes very long.

You also have to realize, I don’t do max effort squats, I squat what I can squat explosively.

watch how my teammate stands up from this heavy clean. See how when he starts to stand up, his ass comes up first.

42

I agree.

43

You shouldn’t be pushing your hips back when you’re coming out of the hole. You should be driving your hips forward under the bar.

44

[quote]romanaz wrote:

Back when I was powerlifting and not letting them go over, my knees would kill me for days after squating.

[/quote]

Not trying to pick on you but I see you post shit like this all the time.

Did you ever even do a meet? Because if not you were never “powerlifting.”

Additionally, to imply that one style (Oly vs. PL, whatever the fuck that means) leads to knee injury/discomfort and the other does not is just fucking stupid.

Based on your strength levels when you started your OL journey I can state with a ton of confidence that you were not a particularly sophisticated PL so your statements don’t resonate very strogntly and to me just communicate a lot of bias.

45

[quote]jmb9286 wrote:

You should be pushing your ass back when you squat. If your knees move out past your toes, a shearing force is created, which places great stress on the meniscus, patellar ligament, and ACL. All of my professors, athletic trainers, and doctors have told me this. Every one of these people have a Ph.D in exercise science, athletic training, or exercise physiology. If you don’t believe me, wait until you are sixty years old and tell me how your knees and ankles feel from all those years of squatting with poor technique.[/quote]

You are clearly not a physics, or biomechanics, major.

Eventually you are going to have to sit down in a squat. You can’t just push your ass back the whole time.

Two reasons. 1. You will never get anywhere near parallel and you will have way more forward lean than is necessary. 2. You will lose your balance backwards once you get deep enough.

Per Hanleys post either on this thread or another, how you are put together is going to have a lot do to with what the lift ends up looking like. You are over simplifying bigtime.

Again, kid. Good for you for going to school and clearly making an effort to learn but your posts do not demonstrate much applied knowledge.

46

[quote]jmb9286 wrote:
You should be pushing your ass back when you squat. If your knees move out past your toes, a shearing force is created, which places great stress on the meniscus, patellar ligament, and ACL. All of my professors, athletic trainers, and doctors have told me this. Every one of these people have a Ph.D in exercise science, athletic training, or exercise physiology. If you don’t believe me, wait until you are sixty years old and tell me how your knees and ankles feel from all those years of squatting with poor technique.[/quote]

Knees over toes is an arbitrary limit to the forward movement of the leg, and there’s no way it can be used to diagnose injury or critique squat form. For some lifters, the safe limit of forward movement will be farther than the toes, for others, it may not be. It’s unrealistic to think that that is a hard and fast rule that applies to everybody, and even more so to assume that everybody who crosses that imaginary line above their toes is hurting their knees.

47

[quote]apwsearch wrote:
romanaz wrote:

Back when I was powerlifting and not letting them go over, my knees would kill me for days after squating.

Not trying to pick on you but I see you post shit like this all the time.

Did you ever even do a meet? Because if not you were never “powerlifting.”

Additionally, to imply that one style (Oly vs. PL, whatever the fuck that means) leads to knee injury/discomfort and the other does not is just fucking stupid.

Based on your strength levels when you started your OL journey I can state with a ton of confidence that you were not a particularly sophisticated PL so your statements don’t resonate very strogntly and to me just communicate a lot of bias.

[/quote]

Your right, I never did a meet and yeah, I wasn’t to strong of a lifter in the big sense. But, I WAS training for a meet, and I was gaining a reasonable amount of strength for myself. I was training and lifting basically the way I was lead to lift by articles by Dave Tate and the like. From what I see with a lot of powerlifters in the USA (ones I’ve meet and such), they all complain of knee pain. Now, whether it is from a different style of squatting (lots of wide stance squats), or maybe its that a powerlifting type squat is slowly, and heavier, thus putting more strain on the joints??

And yes I am biased. I think wide stance suited squats for powerlifting is a bunch of crap. Now, a powersquat I’m not against.

I understand your resentment with my posts, just remember, we all have our own opinions. Thats just mine.

48

[quote]romanaz wrote:

Your right, I never did a meet and yeah, I wasn’t to strong of a lifter in the big sense. But, I WAS training for a meet, and I was gaining a reasonable amount of strength for myself. I was training and lifting basically the way I was lead to lift by articles by Dave Tate and the like. From what I see with a lot of powerlifters in the USA (ones I’ve meet and such), they all complain of knee pain. Now, whether it is from a different style of squatting (lots of wide stance squats), or maybe its that a powerlifting type squat is slowly, and heavier, thus putting more strain on the joints??

And yes I am biased. I think wide stance suited squats for powerlifting is a bunch of crap. Now, a powersquat I’m not against.

I understand your resentment with my posts, just remember, we all have our own opinions. Thats just mine.

[/quote]

The problem is not everybody squats ‘wide stance’. You seem to have a real skewed sense of reality formulated largely by what you see and read on the internet. There is a whole world outside of your computer and you seem to be missing a lot of it.

Most of our lifters (leverage dependent) stand right around shoulder width or slightly wider and in training we squat full range of motion all the time. There are so many variables in tweaking a lifters squat form and the reality of it is that most lifters are not in optimal body position and are unable to acheive the kind of depth we need to in a ‘wide’ stance.

We basically squat and deadlift 52 weeks a year and typically don’t even take a week off after a contest. We come in and do real light stuff and then begin some level of progression the following week.

The point I am trying to make is if my knees hurt, and sometimes they do, it is just because I am using the hell out of them. Inflammation is a fact of life when you compete in just about any sport. It is how you manage it.

Obviously poor form and not managing load appropriately are going to contribute to this but there are way too many people with remarkably limited personal experience coming on here and trying to assert their experience as an example when the reality of this is they should be spending more time absorbing and less time posting.

I don’t really have comtempt for your opinion but do think you have neither broad nor deep enough experience to be making some of the statements you are.

49

Form is obviously one of the most important aspects of squatting, ass to grass in my case, but nobody has really touched on the warmup. As flexibility is a major issue and limiting factor in squatting then some serious consideration needs to be given to the warmup. Preferably a movement based athletic warmup and not static stretching.

I used to olympic lift in my loft I was self taught using Dan John’s info and had no problems until I found an olympic club. The trainer wanted to see what I could and without much of a warmup had me snatching and clean and jerking. My Knees hurt for 2 weeks solid, I had never felt that sort of pain in my knees before and I do not want to feel it again.

50

From what I’ve seen, I find apwsearch to be right most of the time.

51

[quote]rmccart1 wrote:
From what I’ve seen, I find apwsearch to be right most of the time.[/quote]

Haha and if you don’t agree with him he’ll argue such a good point that you’ll just get confused, give up and admit he was right!!

52

Hanley is right, too!

head explodes

53

[quote]apwsearch wrote:
romanaz wrote:

Your right, I never did a meet and yeah, I wasn’t to strong of a lifter in the big sense. But, I WAS training for a meet, and I was gaining a reasonable amount of strength for myself. I was training and lifting basically the way I was lead to lift by articles by Dave Tate and the like. From what I see with a lot of powerlifters in the USA (ones I’ve meet and such), they all complain of knee pain. Now, whether it is from a different style of squatting (lots of wide stance squats), or maybe its that a powerlifting type squat is slowly, and heavier, thus putting more strain on the joints??

And yes I am biased. I think wide stance suited squats for powerlifting is a bunch of crap. Now, a powersquat I’m not against.

I understand your resentment with my posts, just remember, we all have our own opinions. Thats just mine.

The problem is not everybody squats ‘wide stance’. You seem to have a real skewed sense of reality formulated largely by what you see and read on the internet. There is a whole world outside of your computer and you seem to be missing a lot of it.

Most of our lifters (leverage dependent) stand right around shoulder width or slightly wider and in training we squat full range of motion all the time. There are so many variables in tweaking a lifters squat form and the reality of it is that most lifters are not in optimal body position and are unable to acheive the kind of depth we need to in a ‘wide’ stance.

We basically squat and deadlift 52 weeks a year and typically don’t even take a week off after a contest. We come in and do real light stuff and then begin some level of progression the following week.

The point I am trying to make is if my knees hurt, and sometimes they do, it is just because I am using the hell out of them. Inflammation is a fact of life when you compete in just about any sport. It is how you manage it.

Obviously poor form and not managing load appropriately are going to contribute to this but there are way too many people with remarkably limited personal experience coming on here and trying to assert their experience as an example when the reality of this is they should be spending more time absorbing and less time posting.

I don’t really have comtempt for your opinion but do think you have neither broad nor deep enough experience to be making some of the statements you are.
[/quote]

this is true, and I agree with your points. But from my (somewhat limited experience) I see more wide stance squats. You also should note I live near Nazareth barbell where Mike Miller trains.

55

Speaking from personal experience, I have had much trouble in the past with knee injury, specifically patellar tendinitis. I have had it on and off for four to five years now. For me, full squats actually feel much better for my knees and the tendinitis seems to not occur when I have been doing full squats consistently. When I speak of full squats I mean as low as possible, and my knees do go past my toes.

In terms of the discussion of joints and this or that exercise, it seems like many people completely ignore mobility/flexibility work. If there is one thing I learned from having patellar tendinitis all this time is that if I decide to have a half-ass warmup or neglect mobility/flexibility work for a few a little while, my knees hate me.

56

[quote]mopar_nocar wrote:
Shane krausman wrote:
Not a good idea to go beyond parrallel like said above.

Not what he said. Paralell to what?

The point where damage would occur is when the hamstring and calf actually meet and spread the knee like a fulcrum. The LEAST stable knee angle is 90 degrees. Full ROM is desirable, keeping your hamstrings tight and rebounding out of the bottom. This is not boucing your hammies against your calves.

The only acceptable depth is squatting to hips lower than knees.

sb[/quote]

Mopar…exactly! The olympic lifters probably have the strongest knees in the world and they go very low. My knees hurt the most when I stop at parallel or slightly above.

57

[quote]jmb9286 wrote:
If your knees go past your toes or they buckle inward while doing heavy squats, then yes they are harmful. As with any lift, improper technique will take its toll on your joints sooner or later. The best way to avoid potential knee damage from squats is to do deep squats. Your thighs should go past parallel with the floor when you do deep squats.[/quote]

The “knees past the toes” theory is another myth. Number one, how are the toes a standard measurement when foot sizes vary between individuals? And second, as Charles Poliquin said, your knees go past your toes every time you climb a flight of stairs.

Once I started elevating my heels and allowing my knees to go forward (which helps keep the back more upright) my knees and quads have felt stronger than ever. I don’t think you can effectively engage the quads unless the knees go forward.

58

My knees used to hurt after squatting. I focused on my technique, started squatting atg, use neoprene warmers for my heaviest sets and stretch my quads and hams after legday. Made a big difference and my knees have been feeling great for the past 6 months. Just my 2 cents.

59

It’s possible that some powerlifters have knee pain due to completely neglecting the quads, which creats an imbalance. PC dominant box squats, pulling, reverse hypers, GHR’s etc with very little to no highbar squats, front squats etc.

60

TKE’s make my knees feel gooood!