Summary How to Squat Safely Without Pain (Ages 50+) (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Will Harlow If you want to learn how to squat safely, then in today's video, I'm gonna show you the 3 step process to help you get there. If you don't know who I am, my name is Will Harlow and I'm the over fifties specialist physio here at HT Physio in Farnham. And today we're gonna be talking about how to squat safely. Now the squat is a great exercise for people of any age. It's a myth that it's an exercise that most people should avoid.
Will Harlow I think it's 1 of the best exercises that you can possibly use in your daily routine but many people do it wrong and there are a couple of reasons for that. So I'm gonna show you the 3 biggest problem areas when we squat, how to fix them, and then how to do the movement safely. Now before I show you the 3 tips, I just wanna let you know that the squat is not going to be suitable for everybody. Please do get checked out by your health practitioner before you give it a try. And if it causes you pain or there's a reason you shouldn't do it, then just avoid it.
Will Harlow Anyway, let's have a look at the squat and how to do it properly now. In order to squat safely, there are 3 things you absolutely must have. Number 1 is ankle dorsi flexion, and this is where we can move our toes up towards our shin. Number 2 is proper knee alignment so the knees aren't caving in or dropping outwards. And number 3 is a neutral spine.
Will Harlow Now it's easy to say these things and it's easy to try and do them as we squat, But if you don't have the physical capability, they're going to be impossible and then you're going to have a higher risk of injury. So I'm gonna show you how to test for these 3 things in your squat and how to fix them if you find a problem. So let's start with ankle dorsi flexion which is this movement here. If we don't have this movement here, we can't squat because we can't get our knee over our toes as we go down. So I'm gonna show you a squat now and I want you to have a look at my ankles and see what's going on.
Will Harlow So I'm gonna start like this with a nice shoulder width apart feet shares. Keep my back nice and straight and go down. And as you can see, my knees are going over the top of my toes. Now if you look at my right side, I can lean over there and I can put my knee right over my toes without my heel lifting up. But if I do that on the left, I can't get quite as far and my heel on the left side starts to lift up.
Will Harlow Now that shows that I've got an imbalance between right and left, and the reason for that is because of an old ankle injury on this left hand side, which has left me a little bit stiffer in my ankle dorsi flexion than on my right. Let's have a look at this view from the side. So I'm gonna set turn sideways on. We're gonna squat again. We're gonna go down and you can see that the thing that's limiting me here is actually my left ankle.
Will Harlow And you can see I could probably go further on my right, but it's my left that's stopping me from going further. If you have a look from this side, you can see my left in action now. We're gonna squat down and it's there that my heel wants to lift up. So for me, ankle dorsiflexion is the problem in my squat. I'm gonna show you how to fix it if you have stiff tight ankles and that's what's stopping you.
Will Harlow Let's have a look at the exercise now. So here's how to fix a stiff ankle that's stopping you from squatting properly. What we need for this is 1 of these. It's a power band. You can get these online very cheaply, and we need something sturdy to attach it to.
Will Harlow If you're squatting in a gym, that's perfect because there tends to be attachments to the floor that you can wrap the band around. I'm gonna use my bed and we're gonna loop it around and then through like this. So we've got a loop that's securely attached to the bed. Now to make this work, we're gonna imagine it's my right ankle, that's the stiff 1, and we're gonna put the band around the ankle with the thickest part of the band lining up with the line of the ankle joint like this. We're gonna have it nice and low on the ankle like that, and if you want, you can put your other foot on top of the band just to hold the band down.
Will Harlow Now, we want to creep forward until we've got tension on the bands, and all we're gonna do is put 2 hands on top of the knee that's on the side we're gonna be moving, and we're just gonna push our weight forward over the top of the knee. That's it, like that. Come back to normal and then push again, so we're trying to get our knee over our toes and then come back. We're getting our knee over our toes and then coming back, so it's like a rhythmical movement. We're going into the stretch and then back out again, and the way that this works is by pulling the talus, which is 1 of the bones in your ankle back into the correct position if it happens to have slightly crept forward, and that can help you to dorsi flex the ankle further.
Will Harlow Now I recommend people do this for about 30 seconds to a minute, just alternating between coming into the mobilization and then back out, and repeat this a few times over before they squat. So if you're doing squats on a particular day in the gym, you would spend 2 or 3 minutes doing this to warm up the ankle and get it moving before you do your squats. And that is gonna significantly loosen up your ankle dorsiflexion and make it much more comfortable for you as a result. The second problem that many people have in a squat is the alignment of their knees. And as we're fascinating, our knees should travel directly over the top of our toes.
Will Harlow Now some people when they squat, instead of it being like this shares their knees are in line with their toes, they end up like this. And we call this movement valgus and it's very bad for the inside of the knee. And quite often, even though the problem appears at the knee, the cause of it is up in the hips. Because if we're squatting without proper hip strength, our hips can't control the alignment of our femur and it might fall inwards. Now equally, this is less common but if we have very weak adapters, we can get people who do this where their legs fall outwards into what we call a various pattern, which is equally not very good for the knees.
Will Harlow And again, that's a problem with the hips. But I'm gonna show you how to fix this valgus type appearance and the way to test for it is to go down into a squat, looking at yourself in the mirror. And if you notice your knees coming together like this, then you probably have weakness in your glutes up here, and that's what we're gonna try and fix today. So to fix this valgus position, what we're going to do is we're going to strengthen and warm up the glute muscles, which sit just below the belt line to stop this kind of thing from happening. So to make this work, we're gonna do an exercise just before you squat and we're gonna use a resistance band like this 1 here.
Will Harlow So all we need to do here is put the band around the ankles and stand facing a wall or just something you can hold onto like this. I'm gonna start by warming up my left side so you can see. We're gonna keep a nice straight back. Everything's gonna be in good alignment. We're gonna take all of our weight over onto the opposite side, and then we're just gonna take that leg out and back in.
Will Harlow And we're gonna do this movement quite nice and briskly, so 1 second out, 1 second back. And we're gonna keep the toes facing forwards. You can see that I'm leading really with the heel and the leg is going slightly behind me at the same time as going out to the side. Now doing this for a few repetitions, I can start to feel a bit of a burn here, and that's exactly what we want because that wakes up the medial glute and that means that once you're squatting, it's going to be ready to pull your knee out rather than letting it cave in. Let me show you the other side.
Will Harlow So we're gonna give myself a bit more room here, stand up nice and tall, rock over onto the left side, and then it's out and in, out and in, out and in. So the area I'm working is here, my medial glutes and glute minimus as Will's. And we're gonna just keep going until we get a working ache in that target muscle. Do that a couple of times over just before you squat. Remember to take the band off afterwards and then you'll be able to squat a lot better with better knee alignment.
Will Harlow Before we go any further, I just want to tell you about 3 tip Friday. 3 tip Friday is my weekly email that I send out to my list, and it features 3 of the most interesting things I found that week. It could be a health tip, it could be a piece of research I'm reading or it could be a new tool that I found to be really useful for helping people get more mobile. It's totally free. I just send it out once a week.
Will Harlow There's no annoying promos inside, and you can sign up for it by going down below this video and entering your email in the 3 tip Friday link. The third thing you need to get right if you're going to be able to squat safely is to keep a neutral spine. So if you watch me squatting from the side here, look at my back when I start, it's nice and straight. And then as I'm going down into the squat, even though I'm bending forward at the hips, my spine is staying straight. I'm not rounding like this and I'm not up like this.
Will Harlow I'm keeping a neutral spine all the way through the movement. I'll show you another squat like this so it's up and down. The thing that's moving to allow me to come forward is my hips. And this brings me onto the problem that many people have. If they have stiffness in hip flexion and they can't bring their knee up towards their chest, they're gonna get stuck here and then to get lower down, they start to bend their spine.
Will Harlow And that puts you at a higher risk of injury in your spine. And it's where problems like disc bulges or disc herniations can come from, especially when there's weight on your back. So what we're gonna do to fix that spinal problem is improve the movement of your hips. And the last exercise I'm gonna show you today will help you do just that. So the last problem we spoke about was stiffness in hip flexion which is not being able to get your knee close enough to your chest and that means the spine has to curve.
Will Harlow So we're gonna fix that stiffness in your hip and we're gonna use this power band again, exactly the same position as we had it for the ankle, but this time the whole leg's gonna go inside and the band is gonna come right up into the groin just at the space where the leg meets the hip. You're gonna have it nice and tight, and again, we're gonna creep forward until we feel we're in that maximal position where the band is pulling us back. And then to make this mobilization work, again, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna bring our body weight forward, and this time, trying to bring our chest down towards our knee. I'll show you again. So we start upright, come forward, and the chest comes down to the knee.
Will Harlow And you'll feel that the band is pulling back on your hip like this, and it's pulling your femur, which is your thigh bone, back into the socket into the optimal position to allow your knee to rise up towards your chest. Now you can see I'm holding the band here to make it harder because this band is probably not tough enough to use on a hip. It was perfect for an ankle but not enough for a hip. So if you have a stronger power band, you'll need that for this hip mobilization. But again, the same principles apply.
Will Harlow You're probably going to want to do 30 seconds to a minute's worth of this before you squat, keeping trying to get that chest down to the knee each time. And you'll find that after you've done a couple of sets of that, it will be much easier to bring your knee up towards your chest when you squat and your spine can stay straight as a result. So that's how to squat safely and how to fix the common problem areas in the squat. I hope you found this video useful. If you have, do drop a comment below and let me know your thoughts.
Will Harlow And if you want to get more from me, you can pick up a copy of my book. It's called Thriving Beyond 50 and it's got loads more tips and advice like the ones you found in this video. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. I do appreciate your time in watching these videos, and I'll speak to you on the next 1.