How to Fix Your Squat: The 3 Mistakes Killing Your Form

Nearly everyone who struggles with their squat is struggling for one of the same three reasons. Not bad luck, not "just needing to lift heavier" specific, fixable mechanical issues that show up over and over. Here's what's actually going on, and three simple cues that fix most of it straight away.

Your hips and knees need to share the work evenly as you descend. When that balance breaks down, everything else about the squat starts to break down with it. Your glutes, quads, and core are meant to work as one connected system through the movement not fire independently while the rest of your body compensates.

This is usually a loss of hip control, not a lack of leg strength. When your knees collapse inward, you lose tension through the whole lower body, stability disappears, and so does your power out of the bottom. It typically comes down to weak control of hip external rotation, combined with pressure sitting in the wrong part of your foot.

The fix: think about pushing the floor apart with your feet as you squat as if you're trying to spread the ground beneath you. This switches your glutes on and keeps your knees tracking in the same direction as your toes which, on its own, solves most knee collapse issues immediately.

This happens when your hip mobility runs out before you've finished the movement. Your pelvis tucks under near the bottom of the squat, and your lower spine rounds to compensate for the range your hips can't provide. The problem with this isn't just how it looks it shifts load away from your hips and onto your lumbar spine, which is exactly where you don't want it.

The fix: brace properly through your midsection before you descend ribs pulled down, core locked tight, treating your torso like one solid, braced cylinder rather than something that bends to find extra range. This stops your pelvis rotating under at the bottom and keeps the load where it belongs.

This one usually traces back to losing your balance over the middle of your foot. If your weight drifts toward your toes, your torso has to fold forward to keep you from tipping over. That increases shear force through the knees and takes work away from the quads that should be doing it.

The fix: aim to sit down between your ankles rather than back behind them. This keeps your centre of mass over your midfoot, stops the excessive forward lean, and gets your quads properly involved in the lift again.

Stand facing a wall with your feet a few inches away from it, then squat down without letting your knees or chest touch the wall. This forces a neutral spine, balanced foot pressure, and a clean hip-knee movement pattern all at the same time because the wall simply won't let you cheat any of the three. Ten slow reps is enough to start feeling the difference, and it tends to get noticeably easier within just a few sets.

Reading about the fixes only gets you so far the fastest way to sort your squat out is having someone actually look at yours. Send a video through and I'll tell you exactly which of these three is showing up in your lift, and what to work on first.