Why Do the Knees Cave In During a Squat? | NASM Overhead Squat Assessment

All right, so now we're going to come to knees cave in.

So when they're out in this squat, you want their knees to drop straight down like a plumb line where if we had a little piece of string coming down from the knees, it would touch like the second and third toes.

A lot of people are going to have this thing where their knees cave in, right? Their knees are going to come towards the midline.

So we ask ourselves, okay, what is tight? When we are talking about knees caving in, I want you to just do this movement, right? So just look down at your knees.

And then as they come into the center, the knees are adducting.

Isn't this great that we already studied adduction, right? So knee adduction is when the knees come to the midline.

So come up here like around your groin, right? These are going to be your adductors.

You can feel it.

It's like that rope of muscle that is like in your groin area.

This is the adductors.

Picture this.

If this muscle bunches up, just like we have from our muscle imbalance picture, if this bunches up, how does the body compensate? How does the body respond? So if you tighten, if you shorten that muscle, it's going to pull your knees in, all right? So tight adductors...

cause knee adduction.

They are there to adduct the knee.

That's what they're supposed to do.

But if they get too short, then they are going to cause that like as a chronic state.

Okay.

So that's that.

Now on the outside of your body, on the outside of your, your thigh, one of the muscles is the TFL.

So you want to know this as the TFL and you want to know it as the full name.

tensor fascia latte.

Latte is the Latin word for lateral.

So whether they say latte or they say TFL, I want you to see that L and think lateral, lateral.

So anything again with lateral movement, knees cave in is a lateral compensation, right? We're not moving front and back this time.

We're cheating by getting our knees in.