So, we all know that the squat is an all around great exercise, right?
Of course, it hits many muscles in your body, and when it comes to general leg strength the squat is pretty much unrivaled, except maybe by the deadlift, except that that’s more in your glutes and back.
However, one thing that many people fail to do is perform exercises that are going to adequately complement the squat, which is essential if you want to get the most benefit out of your workouts.
So, what I want to do for you here is talk to you about what I think the 3 best accessory movements for the squat are. These aren’t in any particular order, they’re all pretty much equally important.
#1 – Lunges – The lunge is a spectacular exercise, in any form, but I most recommend the walking lunge with a barbell. The reason these are so great is because they work your legs in a unilateral fashion, or in other words they work them 1 leg at a time. This is important because many people have imbalances that they don’t even know about until they start doing these unilateral type exercises. These also help quite a bit with hip flexibility, another commonly overlooked, but exceedingly important factor to a powerful and injury free squat.
#2 – Stiff-legged deadlifts – There is a lot of glute involvement in the squat, so if you really want to blast your squat through the roof, then it’s important to have some direct glute work. The benefit of these stiff legged deadlifts is that they also will hit on your hamstrings, and in doing so complement the squat to ensure that you don’t acquire any muscle imbalances in your legs.
#3 – The plank – Core strength is much more important than people realize, and when it comes to the type of core strength that you need when you squat, the plan pretty much beats out every other core exercise for applicable strength improvement. The plank emulates just about perfectly the type of strength you want to have when you squat, which is a very stable, immobile, type of core. By doing planks you’ll teach your core to stay very tight for long periods of time, something that will go a long way to improving your squat.
Well there’re my top three exercises, I hope that I’ve done a good job of justifying each one. If you start incorporating these into your squat workouts, I can guarantee you’ll see some pretty reasonable improvements over the next couple months.
Thanks for reading!