Knees out when squatting

Today is bench day for me however I wanted to share a little bit about my progress on the squat. While my numbers have increased really well this year I am still far from happy with my squat form. There are a couple of things I have really been focusing on:

1. Staying tight, really, really tight. This means upper back tight, posterior chain really switched on
2. Exploding from the bottom i.e really activating all the fibers and driving like a somofabitch out of the hole
3. Getting foot position right.

Number 3 has occupied me considerably in the last few weeks. I found over the last year as I watched really good lifters, that their setup was perfect. Whereas I have lacked consistency in this all year. Each foot position and movement has been subtlety and sometimes not too subtlety different.  

In the past I have struggled for depth however rereading Starting Strength re hip positioning and remembering Dan Johns great cue that you 'squat between your legs' (duh I know) I realised I was a little too wide in my stance and that I hadn't locked down my set-up.

I have been working on this hard for the last 3 weeks going back to basics, even to the point of chalk marking my foot position so that each session is the same. The second element of this work has been understanding my decent. I am a raw lifter with relatively long femurs so the equipped notion of a large sit back in the squat just doesn't work. 

Part of unlocking the puzzle of my decent has been to work on tracking the knees out more. The idea of cueing the knees out is a pretty common mantra but like a lot of newbies I struggle to contextualize it. A video that helped it recently was the one above by Brett Contreras which is excellent in actually showing what is meant by pushing the knees out. Importantly it shows for a non equipped lifter that you need to narrow your stance a little to get it right.

Very simple but maybe the video will help you too.

Stay Strong

Thomo