External Rotation, The Missing Link for My Technique.... and Maybe Yours.

So here I am, 2 weeks out from competition. I should be getting my openers and letting my CNS recover. Everything should be good to go and I should be ready to compete. But of course I'm not. In typical fashion, I had to tweak and adjust my form some more in the hopes that I will find some epiphany, some long forgotten secret that if found, will make me stronger. This is like cramming for a test. They say it does no good, but I did it through high school, and college, and let me tell you... the shit works. As I am sure you read in my last entry about my deadlift, I have been trying to improve the external rotation of the hips so that I can get my knees out further, and develop more power through my hips. I did this by trying to open them up as much as possible for the deadlift. Doing so allowed me to keep a more upright posture and use less of my back to make the lift. Result, 25lbs PR. So I say to myself, "Well, it worked on the deadlift, maybe it can keep my knees from collapsing in the squat under heavy weight." Now I am a fairly wide squatter and my technique almost looks like I should be in gear, but if you have any issue with your knees collapsing, this may help. What did I do? I rotated my feet out even more. I noticed immediately, that my body WANTED to keep my knees out. I felt like I had been missing out this whole time. I take a lot of tips and training advice from the EliteFTS guys and on one video, Dave Tate actually says you have much better stability with a North-South foot position. In other words, heels and toes pointing straight ahead and behind. This made sense to me. But therein lies the number one most important rule of life; What works for someone else, may not work for you. My switching to a more externally rotated stance hooked me up with a 25lbs PR today. I nailed 575 like it was nothing. Simply by giving my squat stance more of a sumo style foot position. Here is the video.

You can kind of see my foot position in this stance, notice the toes pointed out quite a bit.
2 Weeks out from the SPF Pro/Am in Manchester, TN. Elite status, here I come. NBS Fitness should have another good showing. I think we have won every team competition to date, and we don't plan on stopping now.