Welcome to one question Monday where Dr. Payton Physical Therapist and Teacher for

Evelo and I talk about one of your questions as quickly as possible. We just get in, we get out, and today

we're talking about me's over toes. And there, for the longest time I was taught as a fitness instructor years ago a decade ago

never let your knees pass your toes always keep your knees behind your toes and there's

lots of dogma in the fitness industry and it's still there you know I think it's so present people being afraid of putting their knees over their toes and we do that pretty much every time we work quads So we want to talk about why the knees can pass the

toes and why it's not dangerous and in fact why it's necessary to load the quads. So Payton do want to talk about kind of why people are fearful of this and why they shouldn't be fearful of this.

Yeah, so first going into why people are fearful, I think it came from maybe a legitimate place of maybe they felt tension in the knee and thinking, okay, they felt a pressure maybe in the front side of the knee thinking this can't be good to load the

load the knee in this way and so it just I feel like with other things within the fitness industry it just

caught on and it was like okay well then let's avoid that at all

cost keep your knee directly over your ankle and don't don't press into that.

When in actuality we are knees pass our toes all the time in our everyday life going up and

downstairs you know stips going up a ladder oh not that we do that every day but you know what I mean

yeah what are you doing out on your daily

latter that's me working hard here classic me but yeah so I think that it came from maybe a good place but there's some reasons why it's it might not be founded in in physiology and in anatomy so why people should do knees over toes or why it's important to incorporate knees over toes into our

training is that the tibia or one of the bones of the lower part of the leg is the lever for your

quad and in order to to really target the quad, we want to get that lever closer and closer to parallel with the ground as we can. That makes that lever more active and therefore puts more load through the quad itself. So that means that knees have to go over toes in order to do that. So the way that we do it is we incorporate a lot of sissy squats where the heels are elevated and you can really get pretty low into that position and allow that tibia to come forward and more parallel with the ground. And then we also love, we call a matrix moves,

but reverse Nordic curls, where your lower leg,

your chin is literally parallel with the ground

and on the ground, and then you hinge back from there. So it doesn't necessarily look like knees over toes, but that's what it is just kind of from the opposite way.

Yeah, now and I feel like there's a whole other thing of maybe you might not be ready for it.

And what are your thoughts on that of if someone is experiencing discomfort even in those motions,

even though we know maybe that's how we best load them, maybe not everyone's ready for them.

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