Lower-Body Mobility: Ankles, Knees & Hips

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Your ankles, knees and hips work as a team. When one of them can't do its job, another one picks up the slack, and the knee usually takes the blame.

Mobility is how much range you can use and control under load. A deep squat needs your ankles to bend, your knees to track over your toes and your hips to sit back and down. If the ankle is stuck, the knee caves or the heels lift. If the hips are stuck, the lower back rounds.

Think of it like a three-person team carrying a couch up the stairs. If one person can't lift their corner, the one in the middle usually feels it first. In the lower body, the knee is the one in the middle.

Your First Step: Do the knee-to-wall test on both sides. Face a wall and touch your knee to it without your heel lifting. Slide your foot back until you just can't, then write down the toe-to-wall distance for each side.

The Breakdown

Mobility vs. Flexibility

Flexibility is how far a joint can go. Mobility is how far you can take it yourself, with control.

I care about range you can use, not range you can show off. Every rep I coach runs through S.S.I.: Setup, Stabilize, Initiate. You can't stabilize in a position you don't control.

Ankles: The Overlooked Link

The ankle motion that matters most for squats and lunges is dorsiflexion: your shin moving forward over your foot. When it's limited, the heels lift, the torso folds forward or the knees cave in.

Ways to work on it:

• Knee-to-wall rocks. The same position as the test. Rock your knee toward the wall and back for slow reps, heel down the whole time.
• Tibialis raises. Back against a wall, heels out in front, pull your toes up toward your shins.
• Heel-elevated squats for now. A small plate or wedge under the heels lets you train depth while the ankles catch up. It's a tool, not a cheat.

Knees: Usually the Messenger

Knees mostly bend and straighten. When the ankle or the hip doesn't do its share, the knee gets pulled out of line, most often caving inward during squats, lunges and landings. Coaches call that dynamic knee valgus.

It tends to respond to training. A review of 10 studies found that 7 reduced knee cave with programs of roughly 2 to 10 weeks, and the ones that worked tended to target muscles that cross the knee, like the hamstrings and calves (Sahabuddin et al., 2021).

When I see knees caving in a warm-up, lateral steps with a hip band are the tool I use to teach the knees to stay out over the toes before the working sets start.

One rule here: if your knee hurts, especially a sharp pain or pain in the joint itself, stop guessing. See a doctor or physical therapist. Not medical advice.

Hips: Where Most Lifters Are Stuck

Most adults sit for a big part of the day, and the hips rarely move through their full range. Tight hip flexors, stiff rotation and weak glutes show up the moment you squat deep or hinge.

A few drills that cover a lot of ground:

• 90/90 hip switches. Sit with both knees bent at 90 degrees and rotate side to side. It trains both directions of hip rotation.
• Goblet squat holds. Hold a light weight at your chest and sit in the bottom of a squat. Use your elbows to gently push the knees out.

Where I Start a Stiff Lifter

Not everyone needs every drill. Find the stuck link and fix that first.

I used to run an early-morning mobility class, 5 a.m. to about 6:30 or 7. Monday and Wednesday started with upper body, Tuesday and Thursday started with lower, and the next segment of each session switched to the other half. The lower-body work was hip, lower back, knee and ankle mobility, and all of it was a warm-up. I had PVC pipes, dowel rods, bands, wedges, back extensions, a GHD and Roman chairs: anything that helps a person find the right position.

I always start with a little cardio. Walk around, do some farmer's walks, anything to get the heart rate up, the same way we ran drills to warm up in wrestling. Then the bands come out. Hip bands and Crossover Symmetry bands are my favorites, along with PVC and dowel rods.

One-on-one, I can pinpoint what's going on with a stiff lifter's hip or knee activation, and whether the knees cave in. I used an app called Coach's Eye that let me freeze a rep in slow motion, then draw and narrate on the screen. On an iPad, I could show someone exactly where the movement broke down, at the hip, the knee or the ankle. You can't do that with 20 or 30 people in a class, but with one or two, it works.

The drills always depend on the person. My own mobility is easier to fix because I can feel what's limited that week and adjust fast. A client has to describe it to me, and unless I'm seeing it hands-on, I'm guessing. So I show clients my own mobility work and explain why I do it. If you're dealing with the same thing, try it. Over time, you learn to pair the right warm-up and activation cues with your workout yourself.

For a stiff lifter whose knees cave, I start with a little cardio to get the heart rate up. Then the bands come out: lateral steps with a hip band at or above the knees to wake up the glutes and the outside of the hip. Then squats on heel wedges, stepping the wedge down until you're flat, and wall squats a few inches from the wall to keep the chest up.

What fits always depends on the person: their limitations, their goals and what they're trying to accomplish.

Strength Training Is Mobility Training

A lot of people think they have to stretch for mobility and lift for strength, as two separate jobs. The research says lifting through a full range of motion does both.

A review of 11 randomized trials with 452 people found no difference between strength training and stretching for improving range of motion (Afonso et al., 2021). The studies varied a lot, so it isn't the final word. But it means a squat to full depth, a Romanian deadlift to a real stretch and a split squat with a long stride are all doing mobility work.

That fits with how I train. One of my Five Essentials is to train the entire strength curve: work the muscle from the stretched position to the full squeeze, not just the easy middle.

Bro Science Check: "Lifting makes you tight. You have to stretch to undo it."

What the Research Says: Across 11 randomized trials, strength training and stretching improved range of motion by a similar amount (Afonso et al., 2021). The catch is that the lifting has to go through a full range.

Verdict: Cut. Lifting through a full range builds mobility, so make full-range reps the base of your training.

Where Stretching Fits

I don't do much static or ballistic stretching. It's all about range of motion after the warm-up: some light soft-tissue work, then move through the full range to get everything going.

For anyone who does stretch, the research is mostly about timing. A large review found that holds under 60 seconds per muscle caused only a small drop in performance right afterward, while 60 seconds or more caused a bigger drop. When stretching was followed by dynamic activity, there was no clear effect. Range gains from one session usually lasted less than 30 minutes (Behm et al., 2016).

Before leg day, my warm-ups are active warm-ups: 5 to 10 minutes of cardio, then drills chosen for whatever issue that person has. My warm-up drills are activators. They aren't easy, but they have a purpose: cues, blood flow and activation. Working sets are different. They're moving with the purpose of growth.

Common Mistakes

• Stretching the knee when the problem is the ankle or hip. Find the stuck link first.
• Forcing depth with a rounded back. Depth you can't control isn't mobility. Use a heel lift or a box and build it.
• Treating pain like tightness. Tightness is a stiff, stretchy feeling. Sharp or joint pain is a reason to see a professional.

Next: Building Your Quads.