Weighted Sissy Squat
Trains the Quads.
- Equipment
- A weight plate
- Mechanic
- Isolation
- Force
- Push
- Level
- Advanced
How to do it
- Stand tall holding a weight plate flat against your chest with both hands.
- Set your feet hip-width apart and rise onto the balls of your feet.
- Keeping your hips straight and your body in one line from knee to head, let your knees travel forward.
- Lean back as the knees bend so the line from knee to shoulder stays straight.
- Go as far as you can control, feeling the fronts of the thighs lengthen.
- Pull yourself back up by straightening the knees, keeping the hips in line the whole way.
Common mistakes
- Letting the hips bend. Folding at the hip turns it into an ordinary squat; the hips staying extended is the whole exercise and it is what makes this a knee movement rather than a squat.
- Going deeper than you can return from. The bottom position loads the knee through a long range with the hip contributing nothing, and lowering into somewhere you cannot come back from means falling out of it.
- Adding weight before the bodyweight version is controlled. This is a demanding position for the knee by design, and load multiplies that rather than adding to it.
- Doing it as a first exercise on a cold leg day. The knee travels a long way forward under load here, and it is a position that suits the end of a session more than the start.