Don’t get too frustrated, as you’re getting there. You’re past a vertical shin, which is a good start.

The problem with expressing a huge amount of ankle mobility in the squat is that you don’t have much capacity to shift your bodyweight forward, making it hard to overcome the high amounts of stiffness in the calves. You have to get mad supple down there to really see those gains in bodyweight squatting, even though you might be able to get a deeper position if you had weight on your back helping you overcome that resistance.

The banded mob’s are great (and make sure you try with anterior band tension as well, to work on the glides at the ankle), but you’ll probably find you need to spend a lot of time just hammering out some contract-relax stretching and soft tissue work to get those puppies to yield. 

Here’s my recommendation for a little ankle-targeted mobility session:

1) Test: You can use the squat here, but I expect the payout will be minimal unless most of your restriction is in the joint capsule. Those gains by stretching may take a while. As an alternative, I would also use the knee to wall test (how far can you move your foot back and still get your knee to the wall over the center of your foot without your heel lifting up?) You can measure this bad body and actually have numbers on how you’re improving, as well as how your squat feels.

2) Banded Mob: If, when you squat or do the knee to wall test, you feel pain/pressure/pinching in the front of your ankle, this should be your first go to. Same goes for if you feel those things when you try to do a calf stretch. The banded mobs are meant to restore the mechanics within the joint itself, which can get messed up if you’ve been stiff for a while.

3) Soft-Tissue Attack: Bone saw, foam roller, whatever. If there are little areas of tenderness or lumpiness in the meat of your calves, go after those first, as conventional stretching won’t typically do as much to these knots or areas of high tension.

4) Calf stretching: Conventional against the wall with the knee straight will hit the gastrocs, which will be important (so don’t neglect this), but your real money maker will be the stretches you do with the knee bent for the soleus, as this is the primary muscle limiter of your ankle in the squat. I’m a big fan of the mwod piece from recent years, putting your foot up on a bench, and using your chest to push your knee forward.

Good luck, and just remember that its a bit of a long term process to make good gains in the ankle. Calves are nasty meat.

If you’re currently involved in a strength and conditioning program, programming your mobility work in accordance with the training of the day is an easy way to keep it relevant to what you’re doing. Mobilize problem areas that may compromise your movement within the warm-up, and take care of hard-working tissues after training.

If you have some major restrictions you’re trying to conquer, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that consistency is key. Don’t try to prioritize a whole bunch of issues at once, but choose one or two that you’re going to hammer at in little doses throughout the day, everyday. Take care of the big problems like this one at a time, or at least cycle through them as you see real improvement, and let your training guide the rest.

I would say the major implication of upper crossed syndrome to shoulder impingement is how it affects the movement of your scapula (shoulder blade).

When you reach up towards an overhead position, your scapula should rotate upwards in tandem with your arm. This positions the glenoid (the shoulder “socket”) so that it points more upwardly, allowing your arm to reach greater ranges. However, if this does not occur (whether because of stiffness or muscle imbalances, as we see with the serratus anterior and lower trap weakness / misfiring associated with upper crossed syndrome), your humeral head (the “ball” part of the shoulder joint) ends up squishing tendons and other tissues up into the acromion (that point on the outside of your shoulder), which causes pain and irritation.

Additionally, Upper Crossed aside, if your rotator cuff muscles aren’t effectively stabilizing you shoulder, the humeral head will move excessively upwards on the glenoid (ball rolls up the socket as you move), which can also cause impingement.

Now go see a physical therapist.

Can I get a video of you squatting from the front without load?

The shoulders, neck, and thoracic spine are all very interconnected. Your thoracic spine is the foundation on which your scapulae and shoulders move, so if it doesn’t work properly neither will they. Most significantly, if your t-spine is not able to extend (straighten) properly, it will limit your ability to move your arms overhead because it affects their starting position.

Imagine your scapula as a raft on a lake. If you were standing on it, you could shift your weight to move the raft back and forth, side to side. It would have a lot of freedom. Now imagine that the lake was frozen, and how rigid the raft would become as a result. It’s the same with your shoulders: a stiff t-spine can’t move to accommodate the scapulae, and if the scapulae can’t move properly your shoulder range of motion becomes greatly reduced.

The FMS approach to t-spine mobility seems to favour rotation, I suppose as means of attending to asymmetry in the region. I’ve found that performing more general mobility in t-spine extension (as is typically done on the MWOD) does a lot to open up the t-spine, which may make your rotation mobilization more effective when performed afterwards.

Now, once you’ve made some improvements in your t-spine, a big part of correcting your screen is going to be restore mobility and stability to the scapulae. Your t-spine is the foundation for your scaps, but the scaps are the foundation for your arms. Once you learn how to stabilize your scapulae, you’ll understand the true scope of your mobility challenges, and have a more reliable and quality way to test/retest relevant movements.

The MWOD does a pretty good job of explaining shoulder mechanics, so you should start to get the hang of it after a while, especially if you’re seeing some FMS practitioners. Just be uncompromising in the quality you demand of the movements you’re trying to improve. Remember that quality is the primary focus of corrective exercise, so make the movements you perform as basic as possible to move well.

For example: I’m currently working to balance out the behind-the-back part of the shoulder mobility screen. Right now, after doing soft-tissue work to open up the stiff muscles on the back of my shoulder, my first stability exercise is nothing more than lying on my back with my elbow out to the side of my shoulder, carefully performing rep after rep of reaching my hand towards the ground, taking exquisite care to keep my shoulder from rolling forward. This has helped me understand where I run out of shoulder range of motion before my scap gets pulled out of place, and has helped me pattern that stability into my rotation at a very basic level.

I have personally found improving internal rotation to be a huge challenge, one perpetuated by previously half-hearted attempts to correct it. Make sure you understand that long-term improvements to the screen can come very slowly, just like any improvements in training. Keep plugging away, and you’ll be way stronger for it in the end.

1) Make sure you have a solid grasp of how to brace a neutral spine. There are MWODs on the topic, for sure. As you move to get under the bar to unrack it, you arch your lower back and push your belly out. Breaking position before you receive the load will have a very negative impact on your ability to move well through the set. Practice getting under the bar with good form. Practice it like there is nothing else to the squat until you can do it reliably.

2) Watch that head position. Your chin is dropping down to your chest throughout the video. Keep your head in line with your body. It can help to look at a spot on the floor a few feet in front of you. But similarly, you should practice being able to maintain a good head position while you move and be able to do this reliably before you try to progress the squat any further.

3) One thing at a time. Each set, or even each session, pick a technical detail that you want to improve, and make it your primary focus for the practice session. Trying to juggle all the things you need to fix will be very overwhelming, and result in very little actual improvement.

You’re going to crush the squat! Just make patience your personal virtue while you do so.

1) It’s not really meant to tension the nerve (those are called neural tensioners). The idea is to simultaneously tension the nerve from one end and slacken it from the other end, so you pull it back and forth slightly through the tissue tunnel, which can help reduce restrictions if the nerve’s coating is getting stuck and preventing it from sliding properly.

2) If you have a lot of muscle tension along the neural pathway, this can cause compression of the nerve at key sites. Don’t be too eager to floss the nerve until you’ve resolved those compressing factors.

3) The ulnar nerve passes the elbow on the inside, not in the elbow pit, so that’s probably not what you’re experiencing. The median nerve does run along that area, but if you’re not experiencing pain or nerve symptoms (downstream numbness and tingling, etc) I would look elsewhere for the issue.

I think it’s more likely that you experiencing some sort of twangy tendon snapping over bone, which could be caused either by your mechanics, overtension issues in the arm and forearm, or (most likely) some combination of both (mechanical issues create stiffness which creates mechanical issues, etc). David gave you a pretty comprehensive list of mobilizations to try, but make sure you test/retest the twangy position so you can tell if you made change, and what mobs made it happen.

Also, if you’re not 100% confident in your mechanics, post a video and we can see if that is a contributing factor.

Good luck!