The Floating Heel
Imagine stepping into a workout where your heels never quite touch down—teetering on the balls of your feet through a floating heel lunge or a floating heel squat variation, chasing promises of explosive power and agility. These unconventional moves have surged into the fitness world, thanks in large part to strength coach Cal Dietz’s push behind them. But as the buzz grows, so does the debate: risks vs rewards. Are floating heel exercises the game-changer they’re hyped to be, or do they teeter too close to the edge of injury and instability? Or, are they a total waste of your time? Let’s break it down.
What is a Floating Heel Exercise?
A floating heel exercise is a traditional exercise like a lunge, a single leg squat, or squat variation done with the toes/balls of the feet placed on an elevated platform, while the heels hang off the edge. The purpose of this is to drive force through the balls of the feet as opposed to how it’s traditionally done through the whole foot.
The thought process here is specificity. On the field, we don’t often apply force through the whole foot. Typically, we’re toeing off and pushing through the balls of our feet when we’re going to accelerate, change directions, jump, land, or even slow down. Placing yourself in a position where you’re applying force directly through the balls of the feet makes the force application in these movements more “sport specific.”
The first mention of this movement variation was in a paper published in 1998 by Hakan Alfredson, et al titled “Heavy-Load Eccentric Calf Muscle Training For the Treatment of Chronic Achilles Tendinosis.” It was published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, Volume 26, Issue 3, pages 360–366, in May 1998. The paper mentioned what is now known as the Alfredson Protocol, where the heel was to hang off the edge of an elevated platform, leaving it unsupported during the heavy eccentric portion of the movement.
Cal Dietz and his Tri-Phasic training approach have really pushed this variation into the mainstream of sports performance over the past few years, and with Tri-Phasic Training II dropping earlier this year, it’s only gained more traction.
What Are the Benefits of a Floating Heel?
There are some benefits to the floating heel movement variation. From specificity to kinesthetic awareness
Increased Quadriceps Activation: Elevating or floating the heel places greater stress on the front of the leg, particularly the quadriceps. By reducing reliance on the posterior chain (glutes and hamstrings), these exercises isolate and strengthen the quads, making them valuable for building leg strength and size, especially in the vastus medialis oblique (VMO), which supports knee stability.
Improved Knee-Over-Toe Mechanics: The forward tilt or lifted heel encourages the knees to track further over the toes, mimicking movements common in sports like running, jumping, or cutting. This can enhance an athlete’s ability to generate force from a forward-leaning position, potentially boosting explosive power and speed—key reasons advocates like Cal Dietz promote them.
Enhanced Ankle Mobility and Stability: Performing lunges or squats with a floating heel challenges ankle dorsiflexion and forces the body to adapt to a less stable base. Over time, this can improve ankle flexibility and strengthen stabilizing muscles around the joint, which is critical for injury prevention and dynamic movement.
Sport-Specific Training: For athletes, heel-elevated or floating heel variations replicate the mid-stance or toe-off phases of sprinting and jumping, where the heel is naturally off the ground. This functional carryover aims to make training more specific to real-world performance demands, a concept often tied to triphasic training principles.
Postural and Technique Refinement: By altering the body’s center of gravity, these exercises demand greater control and awareness. They can help lifters refine their form, engage the core more intensely, and develop a heightened sense of balance—though this also introduces a trade-off with stability that critics flag as a potential downside.
While many of the above scenarios are seen as a benefit, I’m going to lay out my case as to why some may be detrimental.
What Are the Detriments of a Floating Heel?
Before we dive into this, understanding that I am looking at this from a movement proficiency perspective more than anything else. In the past, I’ve written about movements like heel elevated squats and my beef with them so go check that out if you want to understand my thought processes here.
When you change the angles of movement patterns, you change recruitment patterns, and where the force gets placed. In my opinion, this can often be a detriment to both performance and overall health.
Now, I’m going to lay out my case for why the above benefits, can actually be detriments when it comes to performance:
Increased Quadriceps Activation: Increased quad activation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if the target here is specificity, then making a lunge or squat variation more quad dominant totally spits in the face of specificity. You’re taking force production out of the hips, and placing it into the knee and ankle. This isn’t specific to sport movement in any way, shape, or form as the glutes and hamstrings are prime movers in locomotion in sport.
Improved Knee-Over-Toe Mechanics: This really goes along with the previous bullet. You’re changing the patterning for movement, and in my opinion, making it less specific to sport movement skill. While the knees sometimes travel over the toes on the field of play, it is usually accompanied by your chest dropping to create a stretch in the glutes and the hamstrings. An elevated/floating heel doesn’t force this posterior stretch, making this movement LESS sport movement skill specific.
Enhanced Ankle Mobility and Stability: I don’t disagree with this one. The stronger your ankles are, the more mobile and resistant to injury they’ll become. That being said, there are significantly better ways to accomplish this like bounds, skips, and depth drop jumps.
Sport-Specific Training: I feel like I’ve laid my case out for this in the above bullets, but I’ll add insult to injury here: lunges and squats already aren’t sport-specific movement skill, and forcing force production through the balls of the feet won’t make them such. Instead, you’re thrashing movement patterns that you’ll need later on.
Postural and Technique Refinement: I don’t disagree with this one either, however, there are significantly better ways to accomplish this that don’t involve placing more stress into the knee, taking stress out of the hips, and thrashing an important movement skill. In my opinion, this variation of movement destroys movement technique, it doesn’t refine it.
While I can understand the thought process of finding value in these movements, I think telling yourself that a lunge or a squat can be sport specific at all is laughable. We use these movement patterns to create cues on the field/ice/court, and to increase strength and speed. They aren’t sport specific to anything.
When we use these patterns, we’re trying to learn to create better torque in the right places, create proper firing patterns, and increase ground reaction forces. These three things will help amplify your sport movement skills. When we use a floating heel, we cannot use as much load. This happens for a few reasons, but if the goal is strength, size, and speed, then load and positioning are paramount. A floating heel destroys this process by changing firing patterns, and forcing us into lighter loads. If your argument is that there is sport specificity in a floating heel, you’re going to have to explain to me how.
Here’s an angle I haven’t seen many take. I think the floating heel may be one of the contributing factors to the 300-500% increase in achilles tendon ruptures we’ve seen in the NFL these past few years. While it’s only correlative, the increase in floating heel movement variations correlates perfectly with the increase in achilles tendon ruptures seen at the NFL level. The reason for this increase is more than likely multifactorial, but I think it’s worth at least looking into. The rationale for this, in addition to the significant increase in the use of these movements, would be that the time under tension for floating heel exercises is SIGNIFICANTLY longer than they would ever see on the field. This can lead to worse timing when it comes to delivering force into the ground, and an increase in fatigue in the heel cord complex. Who knows, but I think the correlative data should give us all pause.
The Verdict on Floating Heel Variations
I tend to speak in absolutes on these kinds of things, but only because these types of things get popular on social media and are then applied to totally inappropriate populations. Is there ever a time to use them? I’m sure there is, just like with everything. But if you’re going to use this floating heel movement variation, it needs to be used minimally and probably unloaded in a movement prep scenario.
If the goal is specificity, then the floating heel misses on every possible level. If the goal is increased speed, then handling less load and not incorporating the glutes and hamstrings to the same degree completely misses the mark. If the goal is better body positioning and awareness, then you’re going to have to explain to me how being in the wrong position helps with this. And if the goal is strengthening the heel cord, then you’re better off doing bounds, skips, and depth drop jumps. They’re significantly more sport movement skill specific.
In my opinion, the floating heel variations of movements completely miss the mark and are better off being left to the side in favor of other movements. Do with that what you will.
