Why Do the Feet Turn Out During a Squat? | NASM Overhead Squat Assessment

to do one compensation at a time.

So everything on this slide, if you look up top, overactive, tight, shortened, doesn't matter what they call it.

These are going to be the muscles that, like our bicep in the example, get too tight.

So we want their feet to point straight forward.

If their feet turn out when they start to squat, then this is showing us that we have some tight muscles here that are causing this.

It's mostly caused by tight calves.

So we have a couple options.

You can just memorize that or you can think about why this happens.

So let's get ourselves into a squat.

So we want to be feet shoulder width.

As we're coming down, think about what is happening in your calf muscles.

Our calf muscles are not working right now.

Our calf muscles, if we were doing an actual squat as we push up, that's when our calves are working.

So when we're coming down, the opposite is true.

Our calves are stretching out If somebody has tight calves, once they're coming down into the squat, they can't do it, right? There's only so far that they can go because they have that bunching up in the calf muscle and the calves need to be stretched out.

So their body finds a way to cheat.

Your body doesn't say, oh, hey, this isn't perfect.

Stop right here.

It's just like, all right, what's the way to get the body down there? Like your goal is to get down into a squat.

How do you do it? And it's through compensations like this, right? They're going to call them movement impairments.

So as we come down, what I want you to do, if you're doing the compensations, just be very careful, right? You don't want to ever take any chance of getting hurt yourself.

And I never ask clients to do it to see it.

If they're doing it wrong, they're already doing it wrong, right? So then we can just show them the difference.

All right.

So as we do this, start to drop down.