The Slant Board Squat (aka Cycle Squat) is an exercise that targets your quads, and is useful for strengthening the muscles around your knees – especially the VM (Vastus Medialis)
Check out this video on how to do it properly!
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Transcript From Slant Board Squat Video
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In this video, I’m going to be demonstrating a slant board squat, also known as a cycle squat. This exercise is to enhance the tension and the load on the Vmo or the Vm, the Vastus Medialis, which is going to stabilize your knee, so we’ve got jade here today. Jay is going to pick up the dumbbells, so we’re gonna do it with a dumbbell you can do with a barbell, but in this video I’m going to be showing you how to do it with dumbbells, so it’s a elevation. It’s quite a significant elevation of the hill and the significant elevation of the heel is going to enable a jade to use her quads a lot more than what she normally be able to and not use the glutes and hamstrings as much as you normally would if your feet were flat. So jade, first thing that should move is her knees should push forward and over the toast.
So nice like that. That’s a great exercise. Again, this is really looked at strengthening the knees or based on the muscles that are supporting around the knees, mainly the Vm, the vastus medialis. Another thing you can do is you want to stay up as tall as possible, so jade, I want to put this stick here and as you can see, her goal is not to hit the stick, so her body is staying erect and that’s really forcing her to just use a move from the knees, which is perfect. That’s exactly what we want. So it’s really enhancing. Go again, really enhancing the tension right through there, spreading the knees. That’s perfect there. The dumbbells, the reason why we, I’m using dumbbells in this video here is any load that I’ve put on her back, uh, you know, we can, if someone does have a bad back, for example, it can exacerbate or, or maybe throw things.
Some of this is a much safer alternative and not to say that a barbell is unsafe, it’s just this is a prep, a preparatory exercise to an able people who might be in rehabilitation phase who have issues with their back as a way to sidestep that issue entirely, especially if when they squat, they move forward like that again for the tilt, it’s going to put load through their back. Now you might be saying that’s a nice block mark, but I don’t have one of those blocks at my gym. That’s fine. Step forward, jade, I’ll just move this block out. The Way and behind what you see is a plate. Now, a plate won’t work quite as well, but the point is you want to elevate the heels more significantly than you otherwise would, and that elevation is working fine. If you’ve got a little wedge board that could work as well.
If you want to even stack two plates or a bigger plate like the 20 fives, you can work with that as well. And just elevate the heel on about a 40 or 30, 30 degree angle is usually probably enough. Um, to 45 degrees is where you’re really getting into a more harsh. And again, with tempo. So when you do these, you really want to emphasize tempo. It’s a four second down, one second upsold. Just demonstrate that with jade. So it’s four, three, two, one. She goes right down to the bottom. I just want to demonstrate this to hear her bum is touching her hamstring. Then when she stands up, she’s going to stand straight up and again, so for three, two, one standing, straight up, one more, four, three, two, one. And one other thing I’m going to mention before we wrap up this video is keep the dumbbells behind your body.
Don’t throw them forward. Just do the colon mistake that a lot of people make when they do this, as they come down, and then as they come up, they throw me even more forward, right? So I keep him back. So do this one. Where we’ll have people on the way down is they’ll keep them back, keep them back, and then on the way forward then because that makes it easier, you don’t want to do that either. You want to make sure they’re staying behind or in line with the body. Hope this video helps you squat better and gives you insight on how to do the slant board squat or the cycles squat. Enjoy this video. Give us a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to us on Youtube for more great videos. Just like this one, or visit our blog for more training tips.
