Norwich Personal Training loves box squats for real results!

Box squats are one of those funny types of training that have been modified from the original purpose. Power lifters such as the guys at westside barbell and others popularized the box squat for sitting back and using the glutes (backside) and hamstrings more than the traditional quadracep (front thigh) dominant technique.
With my clients I use various techniques in the squat depending what is suitable but I nearly always use a box for a different reason. Watching Mike Boyle in action gave me another one of those ah ha moments that he dishes out often! The box enables you to keep the quality of the movement high on every repetition by measuring the depth of the squat. This makes sure that if you ask someone to do six repetitions, they will actually do six repetitions, not six half repetitions! If you tap the top of the box not actually sitting down, you know you can come back up again. So we don’t de-load, or bang into the box stressing the spine with a heavy load on our backs.
This has proved to be very effective over the last few years really improving the quality of the squatting with everyone I work with. The great thing is with this, you don’t need expensive plyometric boxes or anything fancy. As you can see from the photo danny is using step block risers and an airex pad, this is kit you’ll find in most good gyms – or something similar.
So there you go, get to it, measure your squats on every rep and you’ll reap the rewards of consistent depth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Personal Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.