Another Strategy to Improve Your Rooting

In

this post, I addressed the importance of rooting and how my training coach, Taylor Gohn, is helping me to improve on it. In case you missed it, though, here are two good intros to the concept:

An article by Chad Aichs

A video by Murph Now, for me, rooting is an especially bad problem because in the past I've experienced both knee pain and valgus when squatting:

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A post shared by Ben Pollack, Ph.D. (@phdeadlift) on Apr 10, 2019 at 10:58am PDT

Fortunately, there are many strategies that can improve foot positioning pretty quickly. Here's an explanation of my current favorite: Just as a recap, to lace your feet:

1. Double a mini band and cross it over.
2. Thread one end of the band under the little toe and one under the big toe of your foot.
3. Hook the band loop over the heel of that foot.
4. Repeat for the other foot.

Chris Duffin demos the process here as well. Then, with your feet laced, perform calf raises focusing on active dorsiflexion. That means you'll keep tension in the feet, tibialis and calves throughout the entire ROM. Don't stress about sets and reps. It's just a warmup or mobility drill. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!