Addressing the ‘butt wink’ with your clients🤔
This tends to be one of the tougher problems to solve in a clients squat. Why? Not just because there can be a variety of answers client to client, but often… clients can have a really strong or heavy weighted squat with a butt wink and report no pain… but.. we all know this isn’t ideal long term. Address this early in clients to break a bad habit from forming.
Here are 3 things I look at when addressing a butt wink:
⚔️Stability
⚔️Mobility
⚔️Structural – less likely culprit plus can’t be addressed with the naked eye, but sometimes playing with stance can help!
In this example with my Client Haleigh, I assessed mobility and stability. My favorite assessment for addressing stability is the squat with plate press.
How do we create stability?
➡️Cue distally for proximal stability – She is firmly planted and grabbing the ground with her feet, plus squeezing the hell out of that plate to create tension through her mid section.
➡️Add load. Load provides feedback. I’m loading her anterior core by giving her a weight to hold out front of her body.
Once stability is addressed, her butt wink disappears while hitting the exact same depth. (These sets are literally back to back) I now know her butt wink is due to inability to brace with that bar on her back. We can start to work on lumbar pelvic stability in a variety of positions so she’ll learn how she can create stability when load is on her back. She can continue to squat with the awesome depth she naturally has.
Why is this important? If I treated this as a mobility issue, and gave her stretches I thought would be helpful along the way, she would see no improvement in her lumbo pelvic stability. Her squat may continue to get stronger, but her movement quality would likely still lack stability while squatting and other every day movements, leading to a potential injury down the road!
The Break Room 