We’ve all heard the adage “don’t let your knees come past your toes”. Why is that? Well, if your muscles and tendons aren’t strong enough, you could feel pain or at least have a lot of discomfort in that position.
Does that mean you shouldn’t do it though?
What if you looked at it like this:
The ability to squat or lunge with your knee getting past your toes was a sign of how healthy your knees are?
Changes things a bit, huh!
The inability is often due to a number of things:
- Lack of flexibility in the ankles
- Lack of strength in the tendons of the knee
- Lack of flexibility & strength in the quad muscles
- Poor back strength
- Tight or weak hip flexor muscles
- Anatomy of body
Which it is, depends on the person. These are commonly the reasons I see people not achieve this. We spend a fair amount of time during our strength training being able to access this range of motion.
The more range of motion you have access to, the more strength & control you can build on, and the better performance you can have and lessen the likelihood of injury.
Being immobile has never led to better performance or having a body that feels good and does what you want.
So how can you increase your ability to do this?
Increase mobility and strength in your legs and practice squatting and lunging knees over toes. Below I link some exercises we do that you can try out. Follow the order
- Long stretch of the quads and hip flexors
- Front Step downs
- Ankle dorsiflexion
- Quad TKES (if your knees are really weak)
- Sissy Squats
- Heel elevated squats
Do everything for 2 rounds of 45 seconds.
Here’s a podcast episode I made about knee pain if you need to learn some more!
Happy Training