maratoolSit Squats
How to do the sit squats
- Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. This will be your starting position.
- Begin the movement by flexing your knees and hips, sitting back with your hips.
- Continue until you have squatted a portion of the way down, but are above parallel, and quickly reverse the motion until you return to the starting position. Repeat for 5-10 repetitions.
Muscles worked
The muscles under tension are the quadriceps across the front of the thigh, which straighten the knee and, just as importantly, control it on the way back down.
A stretch loads them at the far end of the range they normally work in, so the position you hold is itself the resistance.
Other muscle groups are involved too: the abductors stop the knee collapsing inward and hold the pelvis square; the glutes finish hip extension; the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.
Every exercise for:QuadricepsAbductorsGlutesHamstrings
How this movement works
Force goes away from the body: the muscles press against the floor, a wall or your own opposite limb rather than drawing anything in. There is no weight to add, so the position you can reach and keep is the whole variable.
It is filed under stretching, so the target is range of motion rather than force — a position you can settle into and breathe in, held long enough for the tissue to give.
What you need
These train the quadriceps too, using equipment this one does not:
- Smith Machine Hack Squatsmith machine + machine
- Smith Machine Leg Pressmachine
- Snatchbarbell
- Split Jumpbody only
- Split Squat with Dumbbellsdumbbell
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 173 quadriceps exercises in this database, 70 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.