Stole this from Donnie Thompson. These are a great alternative to box squatting. In my opinion, they are much harder. Donnie wrote about doing these while he was competing and squatting over 1200 and never going above 4 plates. So the principle of getting stronger with less weight really applies here. What makes these more difficult is the fact that you have to stay leaning forward in your squat as opposed to rocking back before standing up. If you rock back with these you will fall on your ass.
Another advantage of these is they teach you to lead out of the hole with your shoulders first. Many athletes lead with their hips then their shoulders catch up. This causes bad movement patterns and in turn low transfer to the field.
With these, we typically did 8x3 or 5x5. You don’t have to get to parallel with these because your hips are stimulated enough as it is. In fact, I’d recommend you actually stay an inch or so above to avoid beating your hips up over time.
Make sure you pause the bar in the chain! Something was going on and I kept hitting the straps crooked yesterday. I need to do a better pause in the bottom. The last set looked a little better. The whole point of these is overcoming the lack of inertia and going fast from a dead stop. You are going to have to lean forward some but don’t get to the point where you are bending over to get to the straps. Keep your chest up and push your stomach and knees out until you’re rested in the straps then blast your shoulders into the bar as hard/ fast as you can. This will keep your head coming up first instead of hips then head.
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These CAN be done in a group setting. We got great feedback from our indicator kids on these when we implemented them. If you want help with this contact me, it’s a bit much to type out on my phone.
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