How to Do a Step Up Lower Body Exercise

Video Transcript

"Hi , I'm Dr. Garrett Smith for Expert Village. The first exercise that we're going to cover in this one leg progression is step ups. Step ups, the great thing about them you can do them with any step around at any height. You want to do one at a height you can control of course. Step ups involve something with one leg, something propping up one leg higher than the other, and the important thing about step ups is it's not. This is what it's not. It's not you using the base leg to boost yourself up. It's not that. It's not jumping up with one leg. It's using the higher leg to lift yourself up. Great way of making it so you're not going to help yourself up much is, you pull your toes up and you come down and touch your heel and you come up. If you're using your heel to touch the ground without using your toes, it's very unlikely that you're going to be using much boost from that trailing leg. We'll call this the lead leg. Great exercise. Something else I want to tell you for those of you who are progressing down the road to chair pistols or full pistols. Basically, if you can do a one legged squat, you know, to this height. Pistols and step ups are using the same amount of weight, your body weight, to lift up. Once you have enough strength to do a step up, where your thigh is touching your calf, you have enough strength to do a pistol. Or, if you're doing chair pistols or modified pistols, whatever height, whatever knee bend you can get to in your lead leg, you can do a chair pistol that deep. The only thing holding you back on those pistols is your balance and your coordination. Just know that you don't have to be really hesitant to do those pistols or one legged squats, you just need the strength and you need to practice the coordination and the balance. With you feet, during this exercise, we don't want to turn this into a jumping with your trail leg, the leg that's on the floor, we don't want turn it into you wasting the time and energy that we want to spend on your lead leg, the leg that's on the step, into a push-off on the floor. To avoid that, or to minimize that, what you're going to do is you're going to pull your toes up so then you can only touch the floor with your heel and you're really just going what we call touch and go. You just touch the ground and come up, touch the ground, come up. Step ups are really basic exercise, fun to do and great to build up to other exercises. "