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I'm doing barbell squats as described in Starting Strength.

When I get to a certain depth, I feel my thigh bone (femur?) pinching up against the inside of my pelvis, and feel like I can't go any deeper. Is my form wrong? Do I stop there? Or do I somehow go deeper?

Note that I didn't feel these before, and was going very deep. But observers told me (correctly I believe) that my knees would go forward too much, or that my hips were going up and down, not back and out. Fixing that (now my squat looks like right) has caused this pinch.

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1 Answer

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Push your knees out. Without a proper video form check it's impossible to really diagnose what's going on, but it may be that your knees are collapsing in and thereby impinging your hip.

You need to go as deep as the book describes, which is defined objectively and specifically as when the crease of your hip is lower than the top of your knee, as in the left-side figure here:

enter image description here

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Yes. Rippetoe actually discusses the impingement specifically in this article: startingstrength.com/articles/active_hip_2_rippetoe.pdf, and how shoving the knees outward fixes the issue. – user3085 May 18 '12 at 17:39
Thanks @Sancho ,that article was super helpful. The idea is you have to push out your knees not just at the bottom, but at the top and the whole way down, and you have to do it by rotating out your thighs, not just pushing at your knees. At least that's how I understood it. – S. Robert James May 20 '12 at 2:20
That sounds right. Glad it helped. – user3085 May 20 '12 at 2:42

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