You know those people that can jump right to the squat rack with no warm up and breeze through a tough squat workout? Well let’s face it, I hate them! Ok, ok, I’m just jealous… 🙂 Since my disc herniations, it takes a few different exercises prior to squatting for the squat to feel to good and to find the squat groove, this is of course after a thorough and proper warm up.
Doing the exercises below prior to squatting has tremendously helped my back feel stable. This is extremely important for me, as my back still can get tweaky if I’m not properly warmed up. So here are few warm up/activation squat exercises I’ve found to be really helpful before I start squatting and hopefully will help someone out there out too!
Banded Split Squats
The banded split squats is a two for the price of one exercise. It’ll not only help loosen your hip flexors but also activate your quads and glutes. This is a typical “go-to-exercise” before I have anyone squat or do their sprint workout.
Simple tip- make sure to have a big split and allow the front knee to move as far forward as you can – hamstring to calf. BUT make sure that you keep the front heel down at ALL times.
Kang Squat
The Kang squat looks really funky but this exercise helps activate your whole posterior chain (glutes, hamstring, and back) to support the squat. For me I’ve found this to help relieve tension off my knees when I do the full squat. I typically will do this with the bar up to 40k and then start going into my squat warm up sets.
Terminal Knee Extension
The terminal knee extension is a simple exercise that’ll help fire up the vastus medialis oblique (VMO). The VMO is the bottom end of that tear drop in the quadricep, in short it helps stabilize your knee. With that said, make sure you roll that sucker out and if it’s really “painful” you better start rolling the crap out of it otherwise could eventually be dealing with knee pain.
Leg Curls
I know LEG CURLS?! BLASPHEMY! I honestly don’t care what some meatballs may say. If jumping on one leg and clucking like a chicken will help me squat, stay in shape for Olympic weightlifting, and allow me to travel around NYC as a personal trainer with NO pain then sign me up!
I first started to utilizing leg curls at the very beginning of my back recovery process (2007). Ever since then, I’ve found that if I left it out of my program for too long my back would flare back up… so I stuck with it. :)…also interesting enough John Meadows put up an article “Leg Curl FIRST, Squat Later” pretty much stating the same thing.
Hip Abduction
Hip abduction exercises has really helped me feel a LOT more stable in the squat too. Simple band exercises such as the monster walk, lateral ab-duction walk, and/or resisted quick feet are great examples to help activate your glute medius/maximus and other smaller muscles within the hip.
You can easily see how these muscles can help with the stability of your lower back.
Sample Set Up
Routine 1
- Banded Split Squats x10 each leg
- Bar Kang Squats x5
- Banded Split Squats x10 each leg
- Kang Squats x5 with some weight
- Regular squat warm up
Routine 2
- Leg curls x10
- TKE x15
- Bar squats
- Leg curls x10
- TKE x15
- Squat warm up #1
Routine 3
- Hip abduction work
- Bar Kang squats x5
- Banded split squat x10 each leg
- Squat warm up #1
How you do your warm up/activation exercise is very dependent on how you’re feeling and what the program is like. For me on heavier days with lower reps I typically would do banded split squats and kang squats. With lighter high rep days I’ll do either TKE, hip abduction, and/or leg curls. It also depends on how I feel, if I don’t feel comfortable in the bottom position I’ll test out another movement and once I finally find the groove then I’ll jump into squat workout.
Train smart,
Team Fusion Trained