Name: The "Butt Wink" Squat Flaw (What Causes It and How to Fix It!)
Uploaded: 2018-05-16T13:32:56.000Z
Duration: 6 min 49 s
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What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.

Another video for you today to cover The Butt Wink. We know it's one of the most characteristic

flaws of a squat, especially the deeper that you get.

But what causes it? And more so, what can you do about it?

First of all, let's take a look at The Butt Wink for those of you who aren't familiar

As you can see, when I'm going down into the squat, all looks good. I've got a nice, proper

My butt is back. but when I hit a certain depth, there's the wink. The wink comes from

the pelvis changing position from an anterior tilt into a posterior tilt.

But you can see, as I come back out of it, I can pretty much immediately reestablish

that positioning again, the proper position, back into an anterior tilt.

So, what's the issue? I can tell you right off the bat, guys, it's not a strength issue.

Matter of fact, strength issue is more so when your knees cave in at the bottom of a

squat basically to help give you a better mechanical advantage to push out if you have

But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is we're getting this again,

change of the pelvis position and I can tell you it's more of a mobility or a flexibility

So, let's take a look at the board. As we all know, here as a PT, I like to look at

things like a kinetic chain because that's what we are.

We're one smooth kinetic chain from the point of contact with the ground to however tall

And all of our forces ride up and down that kinetic chain, so when there's a dysfunction

like there is with The Butt Wink, here in the pelvis,

you've got to learn to look above and below, always, the site of dysfunction because that's

usually how you find what the problem is.

I can tell you, in the case of The Butt Wink, that 90 percent of the time, the source is

going to be here below and namely in the hamstring length.

So, as you see on this diagram here, we've got 2 versions. We've got an anterior tilt

where you've got your proper arch in your back at the bottom of the squat.

And then you've got your posterior tilt where your butt curls under at the bottom of the

The main difference here is the attachment of the hamstrings. I'm going to show you here

The hamstrings will attach to the back of your pelvis, the ischial tuberosity way back

So, you can see that those 2 points get farther and farther away. At some point, there's a

And you're either going to stop going down into your squat, or if you're going to continue

to go down, then it's going to have to shorten that distance because the tension is too great.

It can't withstand that tension anymore, so you're going to give in. And usually our body

will do just that because it's very smart.

It's going to give in. That's what happens here. You're going to shorten that distance.

If this arm here represents my low back and then my butt out here, ok, with the attachment

And this arm represents my femur. So, here I am in the bottom of a parallel squat, or

lower, but right to the bottom of the squat.

If these distances between this elbow and this elbow, these are the attachments of the

hamstrings, right along here, elbow to elbow,

you can see that if I reach a point where I no longer have any more flexibility left

That. Posterior Tilt. Here, good arch in my low back, going down, going down, can't get

there any more, posterior tilt to the pelvis.

Now I just brought this point a lot closer to this elbow. I've relieved the tension on

that hamstring muscle, and now I'm good to go.

Now, as I come back out of the squat and I'm lifting up, I've relieved the tension on the

'Oh, ok, now I can get back into that anterior tilt again because there's no longer any stress

So, we don't want that to happen. We want to make sure that we're stretching our hamstrings,

and that we're doing it out of an anterior tilt position.

I've covered this in another video. Guys, if you haven't seen it, watch this video right

I show you how stretching your hamstrings, just because you're bending down and touching

your toes, is not the equivalent of stretching them the right way.

If you want to make a change, if you want to eventually get rid of a Butt Wink, you've

got to statically stretch your hamstrings usually at night,

like I say, before you go to bed if you want to have an impact on the length, but you've

got to do it out of an anterior tilt position

if you want to have any impact on your ability to squat without winking. Again, here's the

Secondly, to wrap up the video, I said that there's always 2 causes above and below.

Above, we can have a thoracic extension issue. That means that I can't maintain the proper

So, what happens? We know that sometimes as we go further and further down that we start

to round forward because we don't have the ability to extend.

That's why overhead squatting is a lot harder to stay upright than it is if you're not because

So, if I can't extend, and I reach my point of no return here, what happens?

Well, as soon as I start to break into flexion in my thoracic spine here because I can't

Remember guys, a spine is a spine. It's connected all the way down. So if it starts to go into

flexion here, it's going to eventually pull the entire spine down with it.

So, either way, here you want to do some foam rolling or some type of, not from a stretching

standpoint or a tissue quality standpoint, but from a mobility standpoint.

You try to do a self mobilization of your thoracic spine. So, that 2 pronged attack,

working from above and below, is going to eventually help you to get rid of your Butt

But you've got to work on it. And there's also some things we can do dynamically. We're

going to cover that in a video here shortly.

We're going to talk about stretching the quads chronically in a dynamic way which is different

than the video I just did for you in the past about the static stretching of the quads.

And we're also going to talk about how to dynamically stretch the hamstrings to prepare

That's a mouthful. It probably is more than an Xpress video, but as you can see guys,

There's a specific way to prepare to train. You can't just step into a gym and think that