reckonerBarbell front squat
The bar sits on the front of your shoulders instead of your back, so it has to stay in front of your knees or you drop it. That is the whole exercise: a squat that punishes a forward lean, which is why it stays more upright and asks more of the quads than a back squat does.
Elbows high, keep the chest tall.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell, rack
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, wrist, shoulder, lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the rack and take the bar
Bar at the height of your collarbones. Walk into it so it sits on the shelf made by your front deltoids and your collarbones, not in your hands. Your hands are there to stop it rolling forward. Nothing else.
Pick a grip you can actually hold
Fingers under the bar with the elbows up is the strong one and it wants wrist and shoulder range you may not have. Crossed arms holds the same shelf with no wrist demand at all. Neither is cheating and the bar cannot tell the difference.
Elbows high before you move
Drive the points of the elbows up until the upper arms are close to level with the floor. That is the cue on your wrist. Elbows that drop send the bar forward, and the bar going forward is how a front squat ends.
Sit straight down
Break at the knees and the hips together and go down between your feet rather than back behind them. Chest tall, ribs stacked over the hips. Go as deep as you can hold that shape.
Stand up without letting the chest fold
Push the floor away and keep the elbows where they were. If the elbows drop on the way up, the weight is heavier than your rack position, which is a different problem from being heavier than your legs.
What goes wrong
Holding the bar in your hands
The bar is carried by your shoulders. Hands that grip it tightly pull the elbows down and the bar with them. Loosen the fingers, raise the elbows, and let the shelf do the work.
Treating it as a back squat with worse ergonomics
It is a different lift with a different job. Fifteen trained lifters measured through both produced significantly higher knee compressive forces and knee extensor moments on the back squat, while overall muscle recruitment came out equivalent1. So the front squat is not a weaker version of the same thing. It gets similar work done with less load through the knee, which is why it is worth having when a back squat is uncomfortable.
Cutting the depth to keep the elbows up
A short squat is a real cost and not a small one. Seventeen men trained to 120 degrees of knee flexion or to 60, and the deep group gained 4 to 7 per cent more front thigh cross-sectional area, while the shallow group's strength gain did not carry into the deeper position2. If the elbows only stay up for half a rep, the load is the thing to change.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 60 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 at 60 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 60 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 60 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 62.5 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 5 at 62.5 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Front squat or back squat?
Back squat if you want the most load on the legs, front squat if the back squat is uncomfortable or you want the same work at a lower knee cost1. They are separate movements in the library with separate records, so you can run either without losing the history of the other.
Why can I only front squat so much less?
Because the limit is usually not your legs. It is the rack position, the upper back holding an upright torso, and the wrists. That is normal and it is why the two lifts carry their own numbers here rather than one being scaled off the other.
Will Reckoner give me this with a shoulder restriction?
No. This movement records four restrictions against it, more than any other squat in the library: knee, wrist, shoulder and lower back. Declare any one of them in setup and it comes out of your plan.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Gullett and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. A biomechanical comparison of back and front squats in healthy trained individuals fifteen healthy trained lifters measured through both lifts, the back squat producing significantly higher knee compressive forces and knee extensor moments than the front squat while overall muscle recruitment was equivalent, and knee shear staying small and posteriorly directed in both
- Bloomquist and colleagues, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2013. Effect of range of motion in heavy load squatting on muscle and tendon adaptations seventeen male students randomized to twelve weeks of deep squats to 120 degrees of knee flexion or shallow squats to 60 degrees, the deep group gaining 4 to 7 per cent more front thigh cross-sectional area and more isometric knee extension strength, and the shallow group's strength gain failing to carry into the deep squat