Doing a Lower Body Wall Squat Exercise

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Garrett Smith for Expert Village and this next exercise that we're going to go over, the 'wall squats' is a great teaching exercise for getting in the positions right and the form right on the regular 'air squats'. As in the name, you're going to need a wall for this just like on 'wall sits'. Except, this time, we're going to turn 180 degrees to the wall and we're going to face the wall. The key on this thing is the wall is going to act as your form coach. If you start doing things wrong, the wall will be there to remind you that you're not staying straight up enough. Take your normal squat stance, however far from the wall that needs to be. At the start you're maybe kind of far from the wall. You're going to reach between the legs and you're going to do all the things that we've talked about in 'air squats' earlier. You're going to keep a good lumbar curve, you're going to have your back arched like it normally would be. You're going to reach down between the legs, the knees stay over the feet, and we're going to stay straight up and down. As far down as we can go. We really want to try to get our hip crease below the top of the knee, and then back up. Once you're able to do it, if you can do it this far from the wall, you're goal is to move closer. Once you get close to the wall, as you start coming down, you'll notice that it's much tougher. You have to really pull yourself tight in the position to go down. Keep moving closer. The goal, hopefully, will be eventually to have your feet on the wall. You just pull down, really get tight, and then back up, and you can keep moving closer and closer. The closer you're able to get to the wall, I can tell you, the better your squat is. Just follow all the guidelines we went over in the 'air squat' and use them in the 'wall squat'. I use these in my warm-up to retrain my brain before I'm going to do squats. They're just a great training tool, you get automatic feed-back. Do be careful and don't over-estimate yourself, put yourself to close to the wall and bang your face. OKay? Because when you start pitching on this, you can really start pitching. Another thing that people will tend to do is they get too close and they start really leaning back and then they stumble backwards. Be really careful, know your limits, take a good distance from the wall that you can start with. It's always better to start with too much distance than not enough. Then, as your squats get better and better and you're following instructions more closely, you can get closer and closer to the wall. Those are 'wall squats'. "