12/05/2025
When we talk squat technique, the knees often get the spotlight — and for good reason. Excessive bowing out or knocking in can both change where you load the movement and what tissues take on the stress.
But here’s the nuance:
✅ Everyone is anatomically different. Hip structure, femur length, ankle mobility — all of it shapes how your squat naturally looks. A slight knee-out position or a small knee-in moment isn’t automatically “wrong.” It’s often just your anatomy doing its thing.
✅ In max-effort scenarios (powerlifting, 1RMs, competitions), form breakdown happens. When someone is producing everything they’ve got, you may see knees cave a bit or push out more — that doesn’t mean they train that way every rep. It’s just what happens when the body recruits every ounce of available muscle to move load.
But…
⚠️ We’re not looking for major, gross deviations — especially in general training. If the knees shoot way out, or collapse and touch each other, we lose the intention of the squat:
• We’re no longer biasing the right muscles
• Force isn’t being shared well
• We’re not getting the intended stimulus from the pattern
For general health, strength, and fitness, your squat does not need to be textbook-perfect. But it should live within reasonable bounds:
- Knees roughly track over the direction of the toes
- No excessive collapsing or flaring
- Able to let the arch collapse and push through the mid foot
- The movement feels strong, stable, and purposeful
Think of it like technique “guardrails.”
There’s room to be human, individual, and built differently — but not so different that the pattern loses its purpose.
Strong, controlled, and intentional > perfect.
