Work my quads that much more, right? O I'm going to use a wedge today. If you don't have a wedge, you can use a couple of small plates, maybe 2 1/2 or 5 Pound plates, slide them under your heels and it's going to give you the ability to again, have greater forward travel of the knee as well as get greater activation out of the quad for a couple of reasons. Not just forward knee travel, but also you're probably going to be able to squat deeper.
If you get too high up on it, you're going to be so unstable that you're gonna topple forward. So from this position, heels are elevated. Grab a dumbbell.
Get it into the front rack position right in front of your torso like you have a front squat. This is going to allow you to keep a more vertical torso, which could, for many people contribute to greater quad activation. From here I'm sitting down allowing my knees to travel forward, coming up right down. Up Down Up.
You'll notice when you do it, you get a lot of knee flexion and extension. I get deep into that squat. I keep my torso up which makes my quads have to work. I'm doing a barbell squat or a low bar squat off of a wedge. The bars are further down on my back and I allow a little bit of hip flexion and extension. I'm probably going to be able to lift more weight for sure, but I'm going to use more glute, probably a little more hamstring, and some hip stuff. This I can isolate my quads as much as possible on a compound movement.
It becomes a great way to hammer one particular tissue. And if you want to build your quads, this is a fantastic way to do it. As well as kind of working on some of the better squat patterns and recruiting some of the right musculatures and practicing getting deeper into a squat which might have some nice mobility carryover for you down the road. So I kind of wants to talk about squatting with your heels elevated.
They're using squat shoes. This has been a really large point of contention in the last couple of years for some reason, and quite frankly, I don't understand it. At the end of the day, as a trainer or as a trainee, I wanna be able to squat. I want to be able to hinge, lunge, push, and pull to the best of my ability, right not everybody has incredible ankle mobility. Not everybody's 5 foot nine and has great ankle mobility, great knees, and great hips. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't squat, right If you have poor ankle mobility and you need to use a squat shoe or a squat wedge, all that's going to do is allow you to learn.
Movement better performs the movement to the best of your ability at that given time and you can work on the requisite mobility in your off time or post-workout and those things will eventually come together. But quite frankly, bashing on things like squat shoes and heel elevation, it's just another way to scare people away from training or trying to do something or better themselves in some way. So I'm not a big fan of bashing any of those things. They're simply tools in tool blocks that somebody can deploy. to become a better version of themselves.
So at the end of the day, we should all be working on mobility. We should all be using all the tools we can or all the tools we have at our disposal to train as safely and effectively as possible. In my years as a trainer, I've deployed this heel-elevated squat in a variety of different places and locations throughout a workout. When I've worked with taller athletes, maybe even above 65, I'll generally use this type of squat, either a heel-elevated goblet squat like we worked on today or any type of heel-elevated squat, whether that be a barbell or even a hex bar deadlift.
That seems to work well as a squatting variation for taller athletes with longer femurs. If you're shorter like me, and maybe you want to just build up your quads, this can be a standalone quad movement, right? You can do this in place of like a leg extension. You could do this as one be exercise maybe at the beginning of your movement as well if you want to load it up heavy. And if you're just learning how to squat. Or maybe you're a trainer and you're working with a client who doesn't necessarily have the best mechanics for squatting, yet they have a hard time maybe keeping their trunk.
Collapsing or think about sitting down into a squat because they have really bad ankle mobility. This can be a great corrective exercise for letting their nervous system feel what a proper death squat is like while you work on the mobility on the back end of it.
