Why YOU Should Do Weighted Step Ups

0:00 i'm gonna give you the best exercise that's the king of athletic muscle and we're gonna start right okay so athletic muscle let's think about if we look at it through the lens of what's going to make us more athletic we have to do something typically where we're a little bit more unstable typically something that's going to transfer over to helping us have a large amount of speed so we have to train our quads we have to train our glutes we have to focus on that good drive that good drive phase if we're talking about speed and acceleration think about if we're cutting and then finally we have to have some semblance of a load we have to have some ability to produce a larger amount of force in that position that's typically a little bit more unstable and

0:45 that is going to take us to a unilateral leg lift so unilateral leg lift is going to be in an unstable situation it's going to put the athlete in an unstable situation while they have a load on their back and what exercise is that that's going to be the barbell step up now for starters i recommend about a 14 to 18 inch box this is about 18 to 20 inches i've got longer legs that's okay most athletes have very similar tibia lengths okay so that's where we've gotta be for most athletes even athletes who are six four six five they're gonna have very similar tibia lengths to someone who's six one six feet tall someone like myself so keep that in mind the box height will not vary drastically between specific ranges so what i like to focus

1:31 on is about 30 of my drive is going to come from my back leg almost 70 is coming from my front leg i want to focus on driving from my quads driving from my glutes our glutes are the strongest muscle in our entire body it's our biggest muscle it's the driver it's the engine okay when we're doing step ups we have seen through all data that step ups target the glutes more than any other exercise now they didn't study the bulgarian split squat or what we refer to as a single leg squat so there's some debate around that but they have studied back squats front squats and hip thrusts hip thrusts do not pair in comparison to a step up so the main focus now is that because we know we're working on quads

2:17 glutes a little bit of hamstrings but also stability in our trunk we want to know now how do we execute this if we're a little bit weaker we don't want to start with a barbell we want to start body weight and focus on a big drive okay one of the other factors here is we want to see that knee come past the toe slightly and we want to see full extension all the way through this knee up down okay one common error that a lot of athletes will make is they'll go here there's two things going on there either they're not recruiting from their quad as well as they possibly can or two they have too much weight on the bar so take weight off and execute it properly so after we drive all the way up here we want to go down under control let's say one two down okay a lot of athletes will also go

3:02 plop and that can put a little bit of stress on their lower back what i like to think about if we're even warming up for this i'll show this from the side is if we're doing almost uh a partial range of motion pistol squat here right we can really start to wake up those quads glutes on the eccentric and we want to just barely touch our heel our toes don't touch if our toes don't touch then we're not going to be able to plantar flex and drive too much from that down leg okay so we want to think here nice and controlled eccentric and i'm just warming up okay driving from the glute driving from the claws full extension in my knee then i come back down i'm under control now we're going to show you how to do that with a barbell all right so when we're using a barbell i like to have the squat rack facing the boxes that we're going to and here again

3:49 we use three boxes you can use one sturdy box i would prefer it be a metal box these boxes are bomb proof so they're great okay now i like to have this open so i can unrack go one two i'm on the box all right so now i'm on the box here and i want to have that foot that back foot should be about eight inches from the box if you're a little bit shorter probably about six inches if you're a little bit taller probably about 10 at the most you want to have that in position here and i like to do at least one set with just an empty bar focusing on that full drive back up slow eccentric again one two on the eccentric drive back up one two drive back up now what's interesting is you can start to see with athletes and

4:36 this is where the athletic muscle comes into play you can see with athletes one side will waver more over the other and you'll even start to see the individual push and sort of shift they're trying to shift to target muscles that are already strong enough in their chain if they're not shifting they're probably pretty stable and they're structurally balanced so you can pay attention to that it teaches you where's their imbalance where's their weakness okay drive back up and it helps you advance their structural integrity while training their strength one more boom walk this back in and ideally you'll have someone who's a little bit more mobile than me have those squat stands a little bit wider that's going to help you walk back in nice and safely have a

5:22 spotter it's really easy to rack this barbell down okay so the application is you can go once a week we're gonna push a little bit heavy let's say we do five sets of four on each leg when we're doing unilateral stuff i'd say keep the reps under six on each leg because there is a large amount of time under tension some athletes might have their hands fall asleep they'll complain about that more so than the actual exercise so just keep that in mind five sets of six on each leg is perfectly fine have them rest for a minute minute and a half two minutes and then they can come in and they can do the contrast method do explosive jump step ups after they walk through that two minutes of rest period now they can do those jump step ups and really focus on being as explosive and reactive as possible if you need help with your reactive ability you want to be more explosive head over peakstrength.app you can get 10 free days of access to our

6:10 app today which is going to help you become a better athlete until next time freaks if you want to become a champion you always have to cultivate your power peace [Music] you