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By Root 458 0

adductors tend to pull the knees in, what keeps them out when you use your hips correctly? If ad-duction of the thighs means pulling the distal end of the femurs (the knees) toward the midline of the body, it seems like ab-duction would be the movement used to keep the knees out, and that the abductors would be the muscles that did this. But the abductors consist of only the tensor fascia latae (TFL, a small muscle that connects the hip at the anterior iliac crest to the lower leg), the gluteus medius, and the gluteus minimus. Together they create hip abduction if you raise your leg out to the side, away from your body. Since nobody actually does this, except to demonstrate the definition of abduction in biomechanics class, this is probably not what is going on when we squat.

External rotation occurs when you make your right femur rotate clockwise and your left femur rotate counterclockwise, as when you stand up and pivot on your heels to rotate your toes away from each other. There are at least nine muscles that perform this function: the gluteus medius, minimus, and maximus, the adductor minimus, the quadratus femoris, the inferior gemellus, the obturator internus, the superior gemellus, and the piriformis. (Notice that the external rotators include two of the abductor muscles.) External rotation is critical to stabilizing gait mechanics through the stride. As it relates to our analysis, the action of rotating the femurs out is what actually occurs when you shove your knees out on the way down to the bottom of the squat. Prove this to yourself by sitting in a chair and rotating your femurs the same way you would if you were standing up and pivoting on your heels to point your toes out. Using the external rotators to set the knees in a position parallel to the feet makes all kinds of sense when you consider that they are in an effective position to do it and the TFL is not. So shoving the knees out at the top of the squat, and keeping them there so that the adductors can do their job, is accomplished by the muscles that rotate the hips externally. These muscles anchor the thigh position that allows for both good squat depth and the more effective use of all the muscles of the hips.

Figure 2-44. (A) Adductor anatomy of the right thigh. (B, C) Deep external rotator anatomy of right thigh.

When you intentionally shove your knees to the outside as you come down into the bottom of the squat, not only do you get the femurs away from the ASIS and the gut, but you also allow the adductors to stretch tighter and position themselves to more effectively contract as they reach the limit of their extensibility. A tight, stretched muscle contracts harder than a looser, shorter muscle does because the stretch tells the neuromuscular system that a contraction is about to follow. A more efficient firing of more contractile units always happens when preceded by a stretch. This stretch reflex is an integral part of all explosive muscle contraction, and better athletes are very good at making it happen. Test this by trying to do a vertical jump without any drop before the jump; you will find this virtually impossible to do because the stretch reflex is such an integral part of the sequence of any explosive muscular contraction. When we squat, the hips’ external rotators position the femurs so that the adductors and the external rotators themselves can participate with the hamstrings in the bounce, and the whole hip musculature can contribute to squatting efficiency – if you shove your knees out.

The bounce you feel when you stretch out the hamstrings, glutes, and adductors at the bottom of the squat is not due to knee ligament tightness or rebound. The correctly performed squat is an ACL/PCL-neutral event. You bounce off of the stretched and tightened components of the posterior chain and the now correctly loaded quadriceps, and it is absolutely safe for the knees.

Your timing here is important. If the bounce is used correctly, it will be immediately followed by a hard drive up of the hips. It is important that the bounce is not