Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training

by Mark Rippetoe

The correct stance is taken, with the heels at about shoulder width and the toes pointing out at about 30 degrees. Some people, having been told (often by a football coach) that the toes need to point straight ahead, will need to point them out more than they want to. Some people, having read the muscle magazines and seen pictures of large oily guys with no shirts and no body hair squatting with a narrow stance — "best for isolating the quads, my man" — will take a stance that is too narrow, and will need to be wider than they want to be. This stance is the best for allowing the hips to do their job of lowering and raising; it is not designed to isolate anything but rather to distribute the force evenly between the hips and knees so that everything contributes its anatomically predetermined share of the work to the job. In this correct stance, squat down all the way to the bottom. The bottom is the extent of your full range of motion as limited by your flexibility but enabled by this correct stance. Once there, place each elbow against the inside of that knee, put the heels of the palms together, and jack your knees apart by pushing your elbows out against the inside of your knees, keeping your chest up as best you can. This puts the thighs in a position parallel with the feet, again about 30 degrees out from straight forward, with no twisting of the knee since the femur and the tibia are lined up. Your heels will be down, since that is where they have to be if your weig...