If your idea of optimal sports movement is perfectly straight lines, 90-degree angles, triple extension on everything, and generally minimizing rotational forces, you may not care for this article much.
We live in a rotational world in sport. Athletes “color outside the lines” with their joints and bones to maximize the return of free energy, as well as align their bodies in a way that works with physics and muscle angles and lines.
Wasted time and space is slowly filtering into trading “inches for angles”. This is not just for combine starts, but also how the body is meant to utilize the frontal and transverse planes to gain a rotational advantage in movement in a manner that allows for the recycling of energy rather than the body fighting itself.
When two of the world’s fastest men exhibit the same twisting, internal rotation of the hip, coupled with pronation of the stance foot, you start paying attention. Notice how the faster of the two athletes (Bolt) is actually wider in his steps than Powell.
One of the most common points where I think we may be stuck a bit as an industry, and perhaps for a decent reason, is that of the knees coming together when jumping, shooting a basketball, or the concentric element of a squat.
I say knees coming together, because in this world, we have “valgus” and we have “internal rotation of the femurs”. They are, fundamentally different entities.
In much of sports performance, the supination biased, knees out, stabilizing, rigid and overcoming element of movement tends to be overemphasized (and it’s more of an industry mindset than a biomechanical quality in some senses) and the manner in which the body recycles energy (i.e. moves from supination to pronation and generally uses joints in a series of ever-spiraling figure 8’s) is tossed to the wayside.
Athletic movement, especially elite movement is about aligning the body in a manner that represents strong structures, as well as the continual recycling of energy into movement, and doing so as the body is naturally meant to do within the physical structure and capacities of the individual. Coaches such as Adarian Barr have expanded my mind greatly on this topic.
At the end of the day, we see the knee “triangle” (in some form) in almost all of the world’s best athletes, be it a standing vertical jump, squatting, shooting a basketball, and many other bilateral-vertical skills.
Photo Courtesy of Adarian Barr, Instagram @nonsense_sportstraining (the first part of this article was written before KD’s notorious Achilles injury, but I would hope that you wouldn’t make the association that the triangle formation caused it, since this triangle is also seen in many other great basketball players, particularly great shooters)
We see great basketball shooters exhibiting this phenomenon as well. The last NBA game I went to (I can’t believe how much the game has changed in the last 5-10 years) I was amazed by Anthony Davis’s supposed “valgus” while shooting, which in reality is just his superior ability to form a strong triangle to support his shot and make it more effortless and consistent.
In Just Fly Performance Podcast 67, Chong Xie talked about how when the foot is strong and activated, the internal rotation that these shooters exhibit at the knee is merely the knee coming along for the ride as the femur and tibia are both internally rotated. Since the rotations match, there is no injurious stress on the knee, and the structure is solid. This makes sense, since how many thousands (or hundreds of thousands!) of shots have these athletes taken in this position?
Keir Wenham-Flatt posted on Instagram recently questioning the critiques of “knees in”, and it reminded me how progressive coaches are really starting to “get it” here, but at the same time a vast majority still views any medial deviation in the knees as a big problem in squatting, jumping or otherwise in all situations.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwposqyAQEt/
Something that resonated throughout Keir’s post and the comment thread was:
“can you determine issues in single leg landings by observed bilateral valgus in things like squatting or bilateral jumping?” or in other words “Does bilateral squat/jump knees-in and single leg landing quality correlate?”
To this end, I think a somewhat long-form article (two parts) may help to clear the air a bit in this realm of training and performance, and help coaches to generate solutions (or to avoid over-coaching/coaching athleticism out of folks) in modern training situations, but also understanding the grey area where the knees coming in can be a health issue (on the health-performance spectrum).
SUPPORT for “Knees In”
A little over a year ago, Pat Davidson wrote a game-changing article on squatting called “Knees in for the win” and proceeded to blow our minds by showing the relationship of the gait cycle (supination to pronation, or “outside of the foot” to “inside of the foot”) in terms of the squat as well (supination on decent to pronation on the ascent).
One thing I’ve heard from podcast guest David Weck I’ll always remember is that the body operates on a principles of ever-spiraling figure 8’s. Just look at the hands and feet in sprinting for a simple example of this, but you can extrapolate it to anything (the timing is just a little different across various skills).
In other words, the body is going to use spiraling to conserve elastic energy while at the same time, producing a higher power outputs and reducing injurious impacts and forces on the joints and tendons.
So, support stance #1 for proper (we’ll explain “proper” in a minute) “knees together” action in athletic movement is the spiraling action of the body. We see proper “knees together” in the best athletes, and spiraling is a big factor here as the glutes “load” in femoral internal rotation and pronation and “unload” as the femurs externally rotate and the feet supinate.
Load: Spiral In. Feet are pronated and transverse arch is loaded which allows for an active tibia rather than a passive one. As mentioned in my podcast with David Grey, and talked about in “What the Foot” by Gary Ward, pronation stimulates the supination muscles of the body (i.e. the glutes)
Unload. Knees spiral out as the glutes unload and energy gets ready to be recycled into the next jump.
Support stance #2 is that the triangle is the strongest structure in nature given two rods of support (where a dome is not possible). Does it not make sense that the athletic machine, powered by the subconscious mind capable of solving movement puzzles with thousands of times the power of our conscious mind and capabilities far beyond the most modern supercomputer, can figure out the strongest base of support by which to solve bilateral movement problems (such as shooting a 3 pointer in basketball)?
Or do we think we are smarter than the body, and what is observed in the world’s best athletes, or even amateur athletes who move properly?
Looking at things in terms of moving from supination to pronation and the gait cycle, we can easily see this in the way the body stores and releases energy in a rebounding jump:
- (If in a standing vertical jump) Supination or a neutral position on the initial aspect of the drop down (this phase is generally eliminated if in a rebound jump scenario)
- Pronation as knees come in to form a triangle prepare for the instant of reversal out of the bottom of the jump. Pronation loads and stimulates the supinators of the body.
- Supination as knees move away from each other while athlete uncoils and jumps upwards
This video above was taken when I was 26 years old, and was in pretty good shape in a variety of plyometric and sprint related tasks. I didn’t break my high jump personal best but I scissor high-jumped 6 feet which was better than I did in college. I’ve never had a knee ligament problem in my life, although I’ve had some patellar tendonitis off and on that’s never been debilitating by any means.
I actually eliminated the tendonitis my senior year of high school for a long time when I finally started doing deep squats in my program (and I did these squats with “crap form” with tons of “knees in” under fairly heavy weights as my strength coach didn’t really seem to care to change it! Maybe it was for the best, as in a similar vein to Pat Davidson’s article.
This squatting was heavy and therefore slower, as Dr. Keith Baar talked about. (I’ve recently eliminated the knee pain that has crept in throughout my mid-30’s with a combination of Dr. Keith Baar and Ben Patrick’s methods, as well as extreme isometric lunges).
I see many great dunkers squatting with a medial translation of the feet, and I feel, as with many things elite athletes do, it is simply their body rehearsing what it needs to do to be a beast in their sport.
In jumping, as opposed to sprinting, the athlete experiences re-supination during a greater proportion of the propulsive phase, since the contact and thrust time is a little longer. In sprinting, supination is still happening as the foot leaves the ground.
In Keir’s post on “knees in” the question was asked if bilateral “knees in” a bilateral stance landing or jump will yield instability or valgus in a single leg landing.
My sediment is this:
Natural “knees in” in a well-functioning human does not lead to a bad single leg landing or any knee injury risk… in fact, it may even lend to a reduced chance of knee injury because it’s hard to get the bilateral “triangle” without well functioning feet.
Un-natural “knees in”, or “knee valgus” is a problem, as it happens without the proper pronation to supination sequence.
The problem with the performance industry is it is so wrapped up in barbell movements which are by nature more supinated or vertically stacked without much work being done in the transverse plane. This “mind” transfers itself over into dynamic movement, which becomes a problem, since dynamic movement operates on a different paradigm (although it doesn’t have to; when you know pronation and supination you can build this into barbell work safely, or at least neutralize losses in pronation via barbell training).
Now the question is… what’s the bandwidth? Is there “bad knees in” and “good knees in” and why would this be? Should we be giving our athletes, especially our females a better service than just globally steering them right into neutral and therefore hurting their performance output? How do we optimize the “triangle” or “upside down Y” in conjunction with the arches and action of the foot? Stay tuned for part II for answers.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is a NCAA Division I Strength Coach working in the PAC12 conference. A track coach of 11 years, Joel is also a coach for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level.
Joel has coached 2 national champions, multiple All-Americans and school record holders in his time as a track coach. In the realm of strength and conditioning, his programs have assisted 5 athletes to Olympic berths that produced 9 medals and a world record performance at Rio in 2016.
In 2011, Joel began Just Fly Sports with Jake Clark as a central platform to promote information for athletes and coaches to reach their highest potential. In 2016 the first episode of the “Just Fly Performance Podcast” was released, now a leading source of education in the sports performance field.
Prior to working in the PAC12 conference, Joel spent 6 years in the realms of coaching, college lecturing, personal training, and thesis research. Joel’s certifications include Neurological and Physical Typing from BATI, CSCS, MAT Jumpstart, and NKT level 1, as well as USA Track and Field credentials. Joel is also well-versed in the Be-Activated protocols as taught by Douglas Heel, and has been extensively mentored by sprint and sport movement coach Adarian Barr.
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