Tips on Lower Body Wall Squat Exercises

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Garrett Smith with Expert Village and we're going to be starting off our squat, or two legged exercise group today with a very basic isometric exercise known as the 'wall sit' or the 'wall squat'. You need a wall for this one, a good sturdy wall. Basically, you are going to put your rear end against the wall and the rest of your back. Depending on your strength level, will determine how far down you put your body. One thing we want is when you're in this position, whatever depth you decide to go to, you want your shins to be vertical. Next thing is, your thighs are going to automatically be contracting in this position, and really, at the base of it this is what the exercise is. Other things we can add, is you want to try and flatten your low back against the wall and then relax your stomach so you can breathe with your diaphragm. This is a very easy position, right here. This isn't much strain, I could hold this thirty minutes. As we get deeper, there's more strain. For me to go deeper down to nine degrees, which is about as deep as you want to go on these. If you want to go deeper you really don't gain any benefit and you might as well start doing some squats. We come down to ninety degrees. Again, we try to flatten the low back against the wall. We are not pushing on our thighs. We are not doing this. We want our shoulders to be down. We're just relaxing the arms at the sides, heads against the wall, trying to relax in this because just holding your body up will be contracting enough muscles on its own. The basic 'wall sit', make sure your knees are not bowing in or out. We don't want a wide stance on this, we want our shoes, our feet to be in line with our hips. Again, then you just hold this for time. Thirty seconds, a minute, three minutes, five minutes if you really want to get crazy with it. This is a great warm-up exercise, it's great if you have knee problems because isometric exercises aren't moving the joint. Let's just say my timer went off. When you're ready to get out of this exercise. Lean forward, push on the wall, and stand up. Don't slide down the wall, it's not a good idea. Just lean forward, push on the wall, stand up. Your thighs will be burning if you've done this right. You'll be fine in just a couple minutes, just walk it off. 'Wall sits', great exercise if you have bad knees, great exercise to build up strength for other squats."