Before the descent, before depth, before any cue about knees or chest, your squat makes one decision that shapes all the others: where the feet go. Stance width is the squat's foundation setting, and lifters mostly inherit theirs by accident — copied from a video, left over from another sport, or simply never chosen at all. It's worth choosing on purpose, because the base decides what the rest of the body is even allowed to do.

The working range

For most bodies and most goals: feet around shoulder width apart, out to roughly half-again wider, toes turned out somewhere between slightly and moderately. That's not one magic position — it's a generous lane, and your best spot inside it depends on your hip anatomy, your ankle range, and what you're training for. Inside the lane, small experiments are free. Outside it, the trade-offs get steep fast:

Too narrow steals the knees' lane. Knees want to track outward over the toes as you descend. With feet close together, "outward over the toes" barely exists as a direction — the knees have nowhere legal to go, so they crowd forward (demanding ankle range you may not have) or drift inward (hello, valgus). A narrow stance also makes the bottom a balance beam. If your knees keep caving despite every cue, check the base before blaming the knees: sometimes the lane was never wide enough to hold.

Very wide changes the lift. Serious width shifts the squat toward hips and adductors, shortens the range, and demands hip anatomy that enjoys it. It's a legitimate style — wide-stance squatting has a proud history — but it's a choice, not a default, and beginners who wander there by accident usually just lose depth.

How to find yours

Skip the formulas; run the experiment. Stand shoulder width, toes slightly out, and do five slow bodyweight squats. Move feet out a half-step; five more. One more half-step; five more. One width will feel distinctly different — deeper bottom, quieter balance, knees tracking without being told to. Bodies are good at voting when you give them candidates.

Then verify from the front. Film a front-on clip and CoachVision measures your stance directly — feet relative to shoulders, as a body-scaled ratio, so the answer travels with you rather than with a tape measure. Around shoulder width and a bit beyond reads ideal, exactly the lane above. The same front view reads your knee tracking — knee spacing versus ankle spacing at its narrowest on the way up — which is the payoff measurement: the whole point of a good base is knees that hold their lane, and now you can watch them do it. One clip, both numbers, and the guesswork is gone.

One habit to keep: same stance every rep. Mark foot positions on the floor with chalk if you have to. A base that moves between reps means every rep practices a slightly different squat, and none of them get good.

The drill — Band-Around-Knees Squats

2 sets of 10 at warm-up weight, light band just above the knees, pushing out against it the whole rep. The band is usually sold as a knee-cave fix, and it is — but it's also the fastest way to feel whether a stance width works. At a good width, pushing out against the band feels strong and natural; too narrow and there's nothing to push into. Use it while you experiment.

Pick your width, chalk your marks, film from the front once a week. A chosen base beats an inherited one — and everything you build on it gets easier.