Making a Case for the Heel Lift

Well your Honour as you can clearly see my client was able to alleviate knee pain, allow the individual to drive through their heels and also obtain an acceptable depth. My previous argument stands, the Heel Lift is beneficial to poor / beginner squatters. Case Closed, Coach V Wins.



The Heel Lift discussion, sometimes I feel as if we are having the Pepsi/ Coke argument when this topic gets brought up. The two sides will never agree on which can of sugary tastiness is best. Personally, I like Coke... and blocking the heels. Why? Because they are better, and don't tell me that I need to support my argument.

 Seriously though, I do like utilizing a heel-lift for beginners or poor squatters for a couple reasons. Go grab your sick “kicks” out of the closet and look at them. More likely than not they have a pretty significant heel-lift, placing your foot in a constant state of plantar flexion. Now look at how often you wear those shoes, probably a large chunk of your day and what type of activities are performed while in them. If you are the majority chances are all of your recreational activities require very little dorsiflexion. For example: your  pick up basketball game or Thursday night hockey . Both will only increase the tightness of our calves, making squatting to depth very difficult, if not impossible. You have spent your entire life in this position so it is unrealistic that you are going to change everything in a day. If we give you a heel block and slowly decrease it while working on ankle mobility your squats will look much cleaner with more depth.

Reason two - The ability to drive through their heels. If you have poor dorsiflexion and to squat to full depth it is likely that the heels will come off the ground. As a society we are very quad dominant and need to look to correct this imbalance with more posterior chain work. Although squatting is a primarily a quad dominant exercise we can gain posterior chain work by driving hard through our heels and squeezing our glutes. If you are on your toes there is no way you can drive through your heels. If you look at Olympic lifting shoes they have a built in heel-lift that aids in front squatting your clean and overhead squatting your snatch from basement.



Expectations – Obviously we do not want to have to block our heels forever. It is more of a transition stage between our current poor squatting self to our future ATG squatting self. I would give 3 weeks for soft tissue work and mobility exercises to correct any ankle issues. So there are my thoughts on the heel-lift feel free to disagree but Coke is way better.