Long legs, wide hip, short upper body: Can't squat properly

[deeprooted]

Hi,

I'm helping a female friend of mine and she's doing everything well, even the power clean. Also she's not the first I thought how to LBBS either but I've never seen this issue before. The deal with her is she's 1.63m tall and has about the same leg length as me at 1.80m (and I don't have short legs either). Her pelvic bone is also very wide.

I've seen her having trouble getting depth despite pushing out her knees hard and still she complains about getting pain around the rectus femoris hip insertion area. Looking at it more closely it was visible on the descent that at about the half squat position she either starts losing contact between her heel and the floor a little or, if I remember her about that, she bends over too much until the bar is in front of the toes. Most of the time it's a combination of both though as a 'compromise'.

It seemed she's still impinging her hip somehow so I've tried to cue her to push her knees out even harder, tried to cue her to keep her upper body more upright and push the knees more forward (which cures the bar path and I think enables her to go a little deeper but as expected lifts the heels up badly). We've tried narrower as well as wider foot stances, with the wider seeming to work a little better but it obviously could affect her depth in a different way and thus still not enable her to go below parallel.

I've told her to stretch her ankles to allow for more flexibility/forward-bend and to get weightlifting shoes nonetheless. In the mean time I've tried to put something under her heels (using very little weight on her back) and it does improve the forward knee travel and keeping a straight bar path without excessive forward lean. Unfortunately she has still ways to go to reach below parallel and I've also reached the end of ideas of what to do.

The only other thing that came to my mind that would keep her torso from leaning over so much or open the angle between the torso and the femurs would actually be to have her do high bar instead. High bar with the intention that with her extra long legs/short torso it would actually produce low bar mechanics for her like in a 'normally' proportioned person.

I'm sure you had experienced something like this before (very wide pelvic bone/very long legs/short torso) and found a solution for it. So as it is with her it seems that due to long femurs she needs a lot of knee travel that her ankles are not so happy to provide (not even enough when heels are raised a bit). Also the excessive forward lean due to the short torso and very wide hips seem to cause impingement. Is there a way to solve this? Thanks in advance!

[Nick Delgadillo]

A video would be quite helpful.

[deeprooted]

A video would be quite helpful.

Makes sense. Tomorrow she'll be squatting again (with her new shoes!) and we'll make a video.

[deeprooted]

So here's the video. She's using a bit less weight here because the hip pain is still bugging her. She also has a slight rotation to the right which we actually fixed last time by overcompensating and having her "turn to the left". It's my fault here as I concentrated on filming and forgot to cue and remind her of that.

What I also forgot to mention before but I'm seeing now in the video: This is the first time she's squatting with proper shoes. Before that she had high top converse that were tied to the top and seemed to mess with her ankle range of motion. The effect was that she lost contact to the floor with her heels early on and seemed to bend over with her torso more in order to "reach depth" and having the bar out of balance in front of the toes. I am thinking that this is what caused her hip pain in the first place. Now In the video she's doing much better. The bar stays better over the mid-foot but I'm not sure it's easy to spot because of the video quality but her heels still come off the floor slightly. It's by far not as bad anymore but it's still there.

Depth got slightly better now too but it's still quite a bit over parallel and she also just told me that she still felt that impingement at the bottom although it's hard to tell now if it really is the case or if it's just the pain she's feeling as of now. It's generally hard to tell if it's because of her wide hips impinging easily or if it's because of her long femurs that want to push the knees forward and thus causing her heels to lift up or both. But I'm really out of ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2laOWupJ-Q

[Nick Delgadillo]

Sweet pants. I was expecting to see some kind of boxed shape troll when you initially described your friend. My opinion is that she needs to get stronger. She won't hit depth and she comes up on her toes because she's not strong enough to get into the bottom of the squat. You can lighten the load, squat to a box, use bands, put her on a leg press, etc. She's very close and probably only needs a week or two to start doing full squats.

[deeprooted]

Sweet pants. I was expecting to see some kind of boxed shape troll when you initially described your friend. My opinion is that she needs to get stronger. She won't hit depth and she comes up on her toes because she's not strong enough to get into the bottom of the squat. You can lighten the load, squat to a box, use bands, put her on a leg press, etc. She's very close and probably only needs a week or two to start doing full squats.

Hah I had to laugh out loud at the what you expected to see. No she's actually a normal human being . But the video and maybe the long t-shirt still seem to hide her anthropometry a little. Her legs are long and the width of the hips unfortunately are not easy to see from that angle. Also the depth looks more ok-ish in the video than it is in real life.

Regarding the strength thing. Maybe some of her balancing muscles are underdeveloped or shortened from using machines prior to switching to barbell training. But she's really not that weak for the short time she's at it. She's benching 45kg for sets of 5, pressing something over 30kg for sets of 5 and deadlifting 85kg for 5RM.

The problem is also the pain she's getting from the squats in the hip flexor area, which suggested to me some form of impingement there. And she actually said she felt like there's an impingement at the bottom which doesn't let her go deeper. Her knees don't seem to slide forward at the bottom either which if I'm not mistaken is also often a cause for hip flexor pain as I remember to have read in some threads. She said her pain was so bad the last couple of days she could barely sleep because of it and lifting her leg up hurts like hell.

The thing is today I've seen her do some stretching and coincidentally she did a rather deep squat with her feet pointed out very far and her knees pushed out very far as well. I don't think knees out that far would lend to ideal mechanics but I just couldn't help it and told her to try that with the empty bar. To my surprise she came down much lower and while she was still in pain and didn't want to do much squatting she also said that she felt like it wasn't really impinging that way. If that's what could make her squat properly, what would you suggest to do? Feet turned out so far surely don't lend to much stability and what with over-exaggerating the knees out anyway?

[rippedcoder]

Also, if I may, those wrists need to be fixed.

[Nick Delgadillo]

To my surprise she came down much lower and while she was still in pain and didn't want to do much squatting she also said that she felt like it wasn't really impinging that way. If that's what could make her squat properly, what would you suggest to do? Feet turned out so far surely don't lend to much stability and what with over-exaggerating the knees out anyway?

It's difficult to figure out what's going on with just your descriptions. What does "much lower" mean? What does "so far out" mean? If she's screwed up her anterior hip stuff, fixing her squat isn't going to automatically make the pain go away. Depending on what's happening, she will have to squat with some pain for quite a while. Take her off the squat and have her leg press or squat to a band for a week or two and see what happens.

[deeprooted]

It's difficult to figure out what's going on with just your descriptions. What does "much lower" mean? What does "so far out" mean? If she's screwed up her anterior hip stuff, fixing her squat isn't going to automatically make the pain go away. Depending on what's happening, she will have to squat with some pain for quite a while. Take her off the squat and have her leg press or squat to a band for a week or two and see what happens.

Yes I told her because there's inflammation it would hurt for a while even if we fix the form. But she specifically said that when she's squatting like she did in the video she can feel like her hips are blocking/pressing onto something as she reaches the bottom position.

We tried the "feet turned out far" thing at the end of the workout with an empty bar and just for a few reps because we were in a bit of a rush. We had her turn her feet out for about 50 - 60 degrees which of course can't be a good thing for stability and I would never assume that using such a stance would be a good idea with weights on her back.

But we tried it to see if that enables her knees to track out wider and if that would solve the suspected impingement. So she seemed to have enough adductor flexibility and she was indeed able to shove her knees out farther that way. As expected it still hurt but she said she actually didn't have that "blocking" feeling in her hips and she got what I would estimate about 2 inches deeper. It could actually be below parallel or slightly above but is definitely visibly deeper. In the next days we'll investigate that further and make another video I'd suggest.

The thing is even though I would be happy for now with that depth and her not feeling that impingement I'm not sure if shoving the knees out as far as she did would lend to ideal mechanics. Not to mention that she only was able to shove them out so far because she turned her feet out so far. Although I'm sure a more sensible foot stance would also work if she could work on her ankle flexibility.

One more thing before she started with barbell training she did some normal gym stuff including leg presses and stupid-ass narrow half-squats because a guy told her that's the best way to do squats and a wider stance with knees pushed out is 'cheating' because you can do more weight that way... duh. But she said using one specific leg press machine in a certain gym during that time gave her that hip flexor pain for the first time. Then it stopped hurting and returned after she started squatting and doing SS for a few weeks. So I told her to stop squatting for a while and try sumo deadlifts with as wide as a stance as possible but not so wide that the hips start hurting again. My thought was to include at least some quad work without squats while also doing the conventional deadlifts as usual. Her pain subsided that way, then we started with the squats again, pain came back and now I'm here.

@rippedcoder:
Yes you're right indeed. She also tends to drop her elbows after a while. I remind her of the elbows regularly but the wrist position really needs improvement and we'll fix that after those hip issues so she can actually squat regularly. The weights she's using now should not cause any issues with the wrists as of yet.

[Kakarot]

Firstly, as rippedcoder mentioned fix those wrists. Hands on top of the bar, you may need to cue flexion to get her wrist into a more neutral position. Fix this now before tendonitis sets in. Leaning over whilst your wrists are flexed is not very comfortable. If the grip on the bar is wrong or inefficient it sets off a chain of unnecessary problems.

If the area where the pain is located is inflamed, has she been taking any NSAIDs? If not, load her up.

Google and research trigger point therapy, mashing/rolling around on a tennis ball helps greatly. Using a foam roller, rolling pin, 2L full bottle and elbow works too.

If she can deadlift 85kg then she should definitely have the leg/back strength to squat. In my opinion I think the pain is distracting her from committing to depth.

Heel rising? Tell her to lift her toes or cue heels.

It looks like she's trying to stay a tad too vertical, tell her to look down a little more about 2-3 feet in front. Looking down makes it easier to get into your hips and attain depth.

Try these cues for depth.

Sink into your hips.

Up, up, up (I prefer this cue to knees out, as I personally seem to overdo the knees out cue, plus this helps you anticipate the bounce and gets everything in the correct position similarly to the master cue).

Make sure she's thoroughly warmed up. I'm sometimes a pube high on my first empty bar set.

Go forth and relay this information. Hurry before it's too late! D:<