Why You
Should Push Into
The Ground
During Leg Exercises

What Is Pushing Into The Ground?

Pushing into the ground is a cue to use during leg exercises that encourages more efficient use of our muscles. It creates better stability through the foot and leg, it creates a better stimulus for our muscles, and it creates better range of motion.

How To Push Into The Ground

To push into the ground, we want to think about applying force or pressure into the ground with our foot and leg. A good way to think about this is to try to push your foot through the ground or to leave an imprint of your foot in the ground when your performing leg exercises.

How Does It Help?

To get a better understanding into how it helps, we have to take a short detour into physics. (don’t worry – it’s a very quick detour!)

The location of our body’s position can be defined by our center of gravity. In a nutshell, the only forces that can move our center of gravity have to come from outside of our body. (Think if we’re skydiving why we can’t climb back up in the sky using our legs or arms.)

When we lower our body down during a leg exercise (like in the middle picture above), our center of gravity drops. Now, the only thing that can push it back up has to come from outside of us. Revisiting the above jumping sequence, there’s only one thing in contact that is able to apply a force – the floor. The force that the floor applies to us is actually what makes us move, not our muscles themselves.

However, the force the floor applies to us IS determined by our muscles. The floor will push back on us however hard we push into it. The harder we push into the floor, the harder the floor pushes on us. This is how we move heavy weights or jump high. If we don’t push into the floor, we don’t move.

What Are The Applications?

Pushing into the floor gives us a few main benefits:
– We actively use the muscles in our feet, legs, and hips
– It provides us with more stability
– It encourages flattening of the arch in our foot, which promotes more room for rotation through our shin, leg, and hip.

These are helpful in many facets of training. Actively using the muscles and being more stable allows us to lift heavier. And lifting heavier is how we get stronger and grow muscle.

Using our muscles to their fullest potential and being more stable also allows us to express our athleticism more fully. Remember, to displace our body during a jump or sprint, the ground has to be what propels us. If we think about pulling our feet up, we’re leaving athleticism on the table.

Lastly, if our goal is to increase mobility, we want to encourage rotation and range of motion. Pushing into the ground is going to help promote range of motion through the foot’s arch, the shin, the leg, and the hip. While the goal may not to be lifting heavy, pushing into the ground during mobility exercises will still give us more bang for our buck.