Knees and Toes
Why it’s OK to Let Your Knees Go in Front of Your Toes
It’s common in the fitness industry to hear someone, like a personal trainer, say: “During exercise, never allow the knees to go in front of the toes.”
When the knee moves beyond the toes, as in walking lunges or a full-depth squat, the torque at the knee joint increases and the contact pressure of the patella (knee cap) against the femoral condyle (the base of the thigh bone) is large. Many take this to mean that an injury is waiting to happen.
The warning is well-meaning. That is, well-meaning to prevent us from reaching our optimum functional capacity. In other words, we should, instead, question what happens to the knees during daily activities, sports and recreation. Don’t our knees move in front of our toes in real-life?
Quite often and quite naturally!
Excuse the expression, but good luck using the toilet without letting the knees peek over the toes. Or maybe you should avoid stooping to tie your shoe laces, forget about gardening, and quit walking, running or getting in and out of the car. If you are human like the rest of us, your knees will, at random time, move in front of the toes. Maybe we all should stop being human.
Or maybe we should acknowledge that it is perfectly normal for the knees to move in front of the toes and should train them to do so with ease.
Look at the cultures around the world that spend a large part of their lives squatting on their rumps for extended periods of time while getting work done. They have no more (and probably fewer) complaints about knee problems than cultures like ours who spend little time crouching while most of the time sitting in chairs. How about retired Olympic Weightlifters who perform the heavy snatch and clean lifts with full squats, often with the knees out in front of the toes, for years and decades and yet have no more knee pain or problems as compared to the general population? One thing that a study has found with these retired Olympic weightlifters is that they are physically about 20 years younger in functional capacity than others of equal ages.
An argument can be made that the knee was not meant to bend all the way down while loaded up under heavy weight (like in strength training). If we were to follow that logic, then we should not train with weight at all because the body wasn’t design to bench press, dead-lift, military-press, and pull its own weight up in the pull-up exercise. But we do them any way and with healthy results. Stress must be applied to make the body stronger. It is how we become more functional.
There has been no research to prove that deep squats and allowing the knees to move in front of the toes lead to injury in the knee joints. This concept – a disservice to many people who otherwise would have benefited from deep squats and allowing the knees to naturally move in front of the toes – is a fallacy, borne from speculations based on mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering, however, cannot always be applied to something as organic and dynamic as the human body, an organism that is able to transmit forces in complex ways and adapt to properly applied stress by becoming stronger.
The only time we want to avoid full-depth squats or prevent the knees from moving in front of the toes is when we have pre-existing knee problems or knee injuries. Other than that, a full range of motion that allows the body to express natural movement patterns is suggested to prevent knee problems in the first place.
Of course, we must use our head. If we haven’t spend much time squatting, lunging or doing activities that place the knees in front of the toes, then we should introduce these activities slowly – just as we should introduce any exercise slowly. You wouldn’t want to put a 100-pound barbell on your back and do full-depth lunges with the knees moving beyond the toes if you’ve never even performed lunges. Your body is organic and naturally adaptable, and it goes through positive changes without problems if you are smart about the procedure. Always start with slow movement and the lightest weight you can use, and try to exercise through a natural, full range of motion. As you smartly progress to faster movement and/or higher resistance, your body becomes stronger through the range of motion used.
For 2.5 million years, we didn’t have personal trainers telling us not to let our knees move in front of our toes. We have survived so far.
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