Posture and corrective · Knees caving in
Your knees cave in. The problem is rarely the knee.
It shows at the knee because that is the joint in the middle. It usually starts above it or below it.
What it looks like
How you know it is this one.
- Both knees drift toward each other as you go down, or as you land. They move the same way as each other — if one tracks in and the other tracks out, that is a different thing and worth a closer look.
- It usually shows worst at the bottom of a squat, in the second half of the lowering, and on the way back up out of the hole.
- On one leg it shows far sooner than on two, which is why a split squat or a step-up often finds it when a back squat did not.
Where it comes from
Three places to look, and the fault is usually not where you feel it.
Above the knee, at the hip
The muscles that hold the thigh bone from rolling inward are not doing it — usually because they are weak, or because something at the front of the hip is tight enough to win the argument.
Below the knee, at the ankle
If the ankle cannot bend far enough, the foot rolls in to borrow the range, and the knee follows the foot. We have seen a knee complaint that turned out to be entirely an ankle.
The movement itself
A load you cannot yet hold position under, a stance that does not suit your hips, or simply fatigue late in a set.
Be careful here
The part most advice gets wrong.
One thing almost every article gets wrong: knees travelling inward is not always a fault. In some movements — a skier, a lateral lunge — a trainer puts it there deliberately, because that is the pattern being trained. A camera that calls it every time it sees it is a camera that cries wolf. Ours knows which movements it is judging.
What VeraForma does about it
Find it, then fix it, then check it is still fixed.
It finds it. The free movement screen films you doing a handful of movements on your own phone and names what it sees, with the line drawn on your body so you can look at it yourself rather than take our word for it.
It writes the work. What the screen found shapes your corrective programme — what to release, what to wake up, in the order a trainer would do it — and that work goes inside your sessions rather than being a separate chore you skip.
It keeps watching. The camera is on your normal working sets, not just the test. If it keeps seeing this in your everyday training the corrective work changes to match; when it stops seeing it, that work steps back on its own; and if it comes back, so does the work.
And a person settles it. If you think the camera called a rep wrong, say so and a NASM Master Trainer looks at that exact photo. His verdict stands, not the software’s.
Where it shows up
The movements this one turns up in most.
Keep reading
Related pages
VeraForma is coaching, not medicine. This page describes what a movement screen looks for and what training tends to do about it. It does not diagnose anything, and if something hurts, see a doctor or a physiotherapist first.
