Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [45]
Knee wraps are another matter. When a lifter uses tight wraps, the one-meter or longer heavy kind with the various-colored stripes, he is doing so to lift more weight. The mechanism is the same with wraps as with squat suits. In the absence of an injury, knee wraps must be considered supportive gear and should not be worn. But in the event of certain knee injuries, wraps can be very helpful IF USED CORRECTLY. If you have an old ligament injury that has healed as well as it’s going to, wraps are useful to add some compression, and thus stability, to the knee. A light wrap adds just enough circumferential pressure to the whole knee assembly to act almost like an external joint capsule, as well as maintaining warmth and providing proprioceptive input to the skin and superficial structures. The caveat is this: if your wraps are so tight that they must be loosened immediately after the set, then they are acting as aids and not as support. If you can keep the wraps on for the whole workout without cutting off circulation to your lower legs, the wraps are loose enough to be considered as only supportive.
Figure 2-61. Knee wraps are used to help lifters train with minor injuries by providing capsular support to the knees. Knee sleeves are made of cloth-covered rubber and are used primarily to provide warmth.
Some older lifters with older-lifter knees find that wraps a little tighter than loose support wraps make pain-free squatting possible. By adding more support to knees that have aged ungracefully, wraps can make the difference between a productive exercise and a source of irritation. The compression provided by properly applied wraps seems to prevent some of the inflammation that unwrapped older knees experience when the lifter is training the squat heavy.
Some heavier powerlifting wraps are so heavy that they cannot actually be used as loose support wraps; their elastic is so heavy that when it is stretched into position over its entire length, even applied loosely, it is too tight to leave on, and therefore too tight to consider as just supportive. Lighter wraps are available at most sporting goods stores, and they’re fine for our purposes. Rubber and cloth knee sleeves can be used if warmth is the primary objective.
Shoes
Shoes are the only piece of personal equipment that you really need to own. It takes only one set of five in a pair of squat shoes to demonstrate this convincingly to anybody who has done more than one squat workout. A good pair of squat shoes adds enough to the efficiency of the movement that the cost is easily justified. For anywhere from $50 for a used pair to more than $200 for the newest Adidas weightlifting shoes, a pair of proper shoes makes a big difference in the way a squat feels. Powerlifting squat shoes have relatively flat soles, and Olympic weightlifting shoes have a little lift in the heel that makes it easier to get the knees forward just in front of the toes. Your choice will depend on your squatting style and your flexibility. Avoid shoes with heels higher than 1 inch because these are difficult to use for pulls from the floor, using the kinematics advocated here, and they produce the same problems as using a 2×4 under the heels. Most squat shoes have metatarsal straps to increase lateral stability, provide some very important arch support, and suck the foot back into the heel of the shoe to reduce intra-shoe movement.
Figure 2-62. Weightlifting shoes are the most important