Part one of my Lower Body Mobility series. Part two covers the hips.
I have been squatting with a barbell plate under my heels for a while now. Without it I cannot even get into a bodyweight squat. Somewhere past halfway down, the front of my feet lifts, the part where the toes start, and I feel like I am about to fall over backwards.
I finally sat down and worked out why. This post is my notes, written for me, with the videos I am using so I do not do the drills wrong.
What is actually happening
To stay upright in a squat, your centre of mass has to stay over the middle of your foot. As you go down, your hips travel back. Something has to travel forward to balance that, and the only thing that can is your knees and shins.
Shins moving forward over a flat foot means the ankle is closing. That movement is called dorsiflexion. A full-depth squat needs roughly 35 to 40 degrees of it. A lot of people, me included, have a fair bit less.
When the ankle runs out of range the body has two options. Either the heel lifts so the shin can keep going, or the shin stops and the hips keep going back. Mine does the second. The weight ends up behind my heel, the ball of the foot comes off the ground, and I tip.
The plate under the heel tilts the foot down at the front. That is pre-bent ankle. My shin can travel the same distance forward using less actual ankle movement, my knees come over my toes, and my weight lands back over the midfoot. Weightlifting shoes have a raised heel for exactly this reason.
So the plate is not cheating. It is the right setup for my ankles as they are today. But I would also like to need less of it.
Where the weight should go
While I was at it, I also had the basic cue wrong. I was trying to “sit back on my heels”, which pushes the hips further back and makes the tipping worse.
The better cue is a tripod foot: heel, base of the big toe, base of the little toe, all three pressed into the floor the whole way down. Drive through the whole foot with the heel glued down. If you can wiggle your toes at the bottom, the weight is in the right place.
And in a bodyweight squat the knees are supposed to go forward past the toes. That is normal, not a fault.
Step 1: test the ankles
The quickest check is the knee-to-wall test. Barefoot, big toe about 4 inches from the wall, heel flat, push the knee straight forward to touch the wall. If you can, move the foot back an inch and try again. The furthest distance where the knee still touches with the heel down is your score.
A second angle on the same test, from a physio:
How to read it. Standing flat, foot and shin sit at 90 degrees. Closing that angle is dorsiflexion, and the wall distance converts to degrees roughly like this:
| Toe-to-wall distance | Dorsiflexion | What it is enough for |
|---|---|---|
| 10 cm / 4 in or more | about 35 to 40 degrees | full-depth squat |
| 7 to 8 cm / 3 in | about 25 to 30 degrees | squat to parallel, then you tip |
| 5 cm / 2 in | about 20 degrees | clear restriction |
What you feel at the limit matters as much as the number:
- A stretch in the calf means the limit is muscle, mainly the soleus. That responds to the drills below.
- A pinch or hard stop at the front of the ankle with no stretch feeling points at the joint itself. Mobility work helps less here, and a heel lift is simply the long-term setup.
Test both sides. A big difference between left and right is worth fixing on its own.
Checking the angle by hand does not tell you much. Sitting with the leg relaxed, even a normal ankle only goes 10 to 20 degrees past square, because the calf is not loaded and the knee is usually straight. Standing with the knee bent and weight on the foot, the same ankle goes about twice as far. Squats are a bent-knee, loaded movement, so the standing number is the one that counts.
My result: 7 cm, with a calf stretch at the end. So about 25 to 28 degrees, muscle-limited, and about 3 cm short of where I want to be. That lines up exactly with how my squat behaves: fine until roughly halfway, then the shin stops and I fall back.
Step 2: the daily drills
Two things, about five minutes total, every day or at least before squatting.
Knee-to-wall rocks
Same position as the test, done as reps instead of a one-off max:
- Set the foot about 1 cm closer than your max. For me that is 6 cm. The knee should touch on most reps with some effort, not strain on every one.
- Drive the knee to the wall, hold one or two seconds, come back. That is one rep.
- 2 to 3 sets of 10 to 15 per side. On the last few reps of a set, hold the knee at the wall for 5 to 10 seconds to turn it into a stretch.
- Heel stays down, knee goes straight at the wall, foot points straight. Same rules as the test, because those are what make the reps count.
- When every rep touches easily, move the foot back 1 cm.
A dumbbell or plate resting on the knee of the working leg, 5 to 10 kg, pushes the shin forward with less effort and tends to speed things up. Do it warm, daily is fine, and keep the cold max test separate: once every two weeks, find the true distance and write it down.
Bent-knee calf stretch
This is the one I kept getting wrong. The usual straight-leg calf stretch hits the big calf muscle, the gastrocnemius. The muscle that limits squat depth is the deeper one, the soleus, and you only reach it with the knee bent.
Hands on the wall, one foot stepped back, back heel flat on the floor. Now bend the back knee and lean in. You should feel it low in the calf, near the Achilles. If you feel it high up behind the knee, your knee is still straight. Hold 30 to 60 seconds per side.
Longer walkthrough of the same stretch, with the straight-leg version for comparison:
Once the stretch feels easy, this loaded version from The Barbell Physio does more:
Step 3: keep squatting, with the plate
No reason to stop training while the ankles catch up. Loaded squats with a heel lift are themselves one of the better mobility drills for this, as long as the knees travel forward, the whole foot stays pressed into the plate, and the chest stays up.
Over the weeks the plan is to reduce the height of the lift. If it stops being needed, great. If it does not, that is also fine.
Full routines
If you want one video to follow instead of piecing it together, these are the ones I am keeping:
- Squat University: How to Stretch Your Ankles from Aaron Horschig, a physio and probably the most trusted squat channel around.
- Squat University: Unlock Your Ankles for Deeper Squats
- Barbell Rehab: How to Squat with Limited Ankle Mobility
- E3 Rehab: How To Improve Your Ankle Mobility covers the assessment, how much range you need, and how to programme the work.
- 5-Minute Ankle Mobility for Better Squats if you just want a short follow-along.
And two short clips about this exact symptom:
If the ankles were never the problem
Some coaches argue that for a lot of people the limit is higher up, in the hips, and that no amount of calf stretching will move it. If I retest in three or four weeks and the knee-to-wall number has not changed, or the restriction feels like a pinch at the front of the ankle rather than a stretch in the calf, that is where I will look next:
- GMB Fitness: Ankle Stretches Won’t Fix Your Squat
- GMB Fitness: 90-Second Move to Fix Your Squat
- Markow Training Systems: When Should You Elevate Your Heels In A Squat?
The plan
- Knee-to-wall test, both sides, written down. Starting point: 7 cm.
- Rocks at 6 cm and the bent-knee calf stretch daily.
- Keep squatting with the plate.
- Retest every two weeks. Target: 10 cm.
I will update this post with the numbers.