One Leg Squats with an Exercise Ball

Video Transcript

"ALICE MONSAERT: This exercise is called "Standing Squat," with one leg on the ball. So I'm going to place the stability ball on the floor. This is going to challenge my balance as well as strengthen my quadriceps and the gluteus maximus. So with the ball on the floor, I'm going to place one foot on top of the ball and the exercise that I'm going to begin with is a squat. In a squat, you want the hips to move back and the knee to stay over the foot. I'm going to add a challenge to this by pushing the ball out to the side with the opposing leg, and I'm going to use my arms to counterbalance my movement. So again, I'm sitting back into the hips rolling the ball to the side. So in this position, as I stand up, the quads are strengthening as well as the glutes on this side. And as I pull the ball in, I'm using the inner thigh or the adductor muscles, so press and pull. Show you that on the other side. We always want to work bilaterally from side to side and strengthen each side with about the same amount of repetitions. When we do repetitions, we really want to think about taking the muscle group to fatigue rather than necessarily counting every single repetition. So this is a more advanced exercise, but when you can master it, you feel really good about it, so standing squat with our ball rolling out to the side."