Would you like to be able to do great squats? Do you struggle to do regular squats? Have you wished you could strengthen your legs doing an exercise that pretty much anyone can do with good posture? The wall squat exercise is an awesome lower-body exercise for all ages and fitness levels!
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Wall Squat Exercise for a Strong Lower Body – YouTube Video
Watch the Wall Squat Exercise for a Strong Lower Body YouTube video!
Follow along and feel the burn! This exercise is effective and a good exercise for adults, teens, and kids. You can even do it together as a family.
Wall Squat Exercise
The wall squat exercise is a lower-body exercise that focuses on posture, strength, and physical fitness.
This is a fantastic exercise for everyone from newbie exercisers to avid exercisers. For those newer to exercise, this is a great way to learn how to do a squat with good posture and to train the correct muscles for a squat. For those who have been exercising for longer, it can be a good way to remind your muscles of the posture and muscles you need to activate for full squats and other squat variations. Also, holding wall squats for 1 to even 5 minutes can be a good exercise to include in many more intense exercise plans.
Areas of Body Worked:
Legs
Front of Thighs (quads)
Butt (glutes)
Inner Thighs (adductors)
Stomach (core/abs)
Back of Thighs (hamstrings)
Calves (soleus and gastrocnemius)
Supporting Postural Muscles.
HOW TO PERFORM A WALL SQUAT
If you haven’t already, watch the Wall Squat Exercise for a Strong Lower Body YouTube video!
When performing the wall squat exercise, it’s important to keep these in mind:
- Focus on using good posture and engaging abdominals. Make your upper body as long and tall as possible, draw your belly button into your spine, and keep good posture throughout the exercise. It can be tough to maintain good posture as you get tired, but good posture increases the effectiveness immensely. It will also help prevent injury.
- Roll shoulders up, back, and then down to assist with getting into and maintaining posture. You don’t have to squeeze your shoulders together much, but try to get the middle of your palms in line with the middle of your outer thighs when standing and in line with hip bones when in the squat position.
- Put most of your weight on your heels while keeping your entire feet in contact with the ground. This will help to activate your glutes and work the appropriate muscles.
- Sit back like you’re sitting in a chair and try to keep your back against the wall. The ideal squat position is to do a 90-degree position. In certain circumstances when done correctly, a squat can be performed even lower than 90 degrees. A squat is still a squat as long as your legs are bent even if you’re not all the way to a 90-degree position. Continue to challenge yourself, but listen to your body as you work toward a 90-degree position.
PROGRESSIONS OF THE WALL SQUATS EXERCISE
When it’s apparent that you’re ready to progress to a more difficult version of the wall squats exercise, here are some progressions to try while performing the exercise:
- Lower your squat position going only as low as 90 degrees. I recommend only going to 90 degrees unless you have a fitness professional looking at your technique.
- Increase length of time wall squats are held.
- Increase sets, for example 3 sets of 1-minute wall squats would be repeating a 1-minute wall squat exercise 3 times.
- Add an exercise ball to hold in front or with arms raised above your head. You can also place the ball behind your back for the wall squat to add a little instability compared to only a wall.
- Add a small Pilates-style exercise ball between your inner thighs to increase adductor/inner thigh activation.
- Add a resistance loop band around your outer thighs to increase abductor/outer thigh activation.
Once you would like to do or work into squats away from a wall, you can try some of these squat variations in addition to traditional squats.
Alternating Leg Squat – Strong, Powerful Legs
Sumo Squats – Toned Legs and Butt
Jump Squats – Fat Burning Plyometrics
Single Leg Squats – Strong, Lean Legs
What I’m Wearing
Workout Top: Under Armour (under $15!!!) (Also available (on sale under $30!!!) here and here.) | Workout Capris: Lorna Jane, unavailable. (Similar style Lorna Jane capris (on sale under $55!!!) available here and here.) | Cross Trainers: New Balance (under $100!!!) | Fitbit: Fitbit Flex, old. (Similar style newer Fitbit Alta.) | Stud Earrings: Nadri (Similar style Nadri earrings here (on sale under $20!!!).) | Makeup: Younique
Have Fun Exercising!
I find this is a great exercise to incorporate in my workouts and even as an exercise on its own performed during the day or night. To really feel the burn and make my legs shake a bit, I like to hold my wall squats for 5 minutes!
However long you like to hold them, wall squats are an effective exercise, especially when you hold them for at least 30 seconds or more.
What other exercises would you like me to create exercise tutorials for? Are there certain areas of the body you would like more exercises on?
Have fun!
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I look forward to reading your comments, seeing your photos, and chatting with you on social media!
I love incorporating wall sits into my workouts. Thanks for the refresher Christina!
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