Squat Talk: Ankle Mobility or Negative Shin Angle
What elevating your heels does to your squat mechanics
Problem: Your squat isn’t what you want it to be. You want it to be better.
Intervention: You elevate your heels (with lifting shoes, a slant board, plates or whatever).
Outcome: Your squat improves. You can go deeper. You have more control. You can move more weight and feel the squat is helping you get stronger.
Why did you squat improve?
The easiest answer is to say that your squat improved because the intervention (elevating your heels) put your foot at a different angle in relation to your shin.
This new starting position ‘opens the front of the ankle’. Or allows more space for dorsiflexion.
Allowing more space for dorsiflexion means you are increasing plantar flexion of the ankle.
Plantar flexion is a combination of the foot points away and/or the shin moving backwards.
So, if you find elevating your heels benefits your squat then you could also benefit from training this negative shin angle.
You can also just squat with your heels elevated. There’s no rules that say you can’t. And squatting with your heels elevated IS how you train this negative shin angle.
But there are other way to train this negative shin angle (plantar flexion) that could also be a great addition to you training.
Training the negative shin angle is also great for people who have tried to fix their ankle mobility but found they didnt get the results they wanted.
Negative shin angle training is not nearly as common as ankle mobility, but I would argue just as important.
The negative shin angle is one of the secrets that Knees Over Toes Guy Ben Patrick uses in his programming. Walking backwards is perhaps the easiest way to train this, but the using tib bar (Tib bar review, Tib Factory, Amazon Tib Bar) and tib raises are also a fine way to train this uncommon skill.
There are other ways that may be more appropriate for other situations besides the squat but dont neglect the tib angle!
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