reckonerBox squat
A squat with a box behind you that you sit back to touch. The box fixes the depth, which is the point: every rep is the same depth, so a set that got shallow as you tired is a set you can see rather than one you have to guess at.
Sit back to touch, stay tight on the box.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Barbell, rack, box
- 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
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, neck, shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the box where you want the depth
The box is a ruler, not a seat. Set it at the depth you intend to train and it will hold you to it. Set it high because the weight is heavy and you have chosen a different exercise.
Stand a little wider than a free squat
Feet a touch outside your normal stance with the toes turned out. You are going to travel backwards as well as down, and a narrow stance leaves nowhere to put your hips.
Sit back rather than down
Push the hips back first and let the knees follow. That is the cue on your wrist. The shins stay closer to vertical than they would on a free squat, which is what shifts the work back toward the hips.
Touch and stay tight
Touch the box. Do not sit down on it, do not relax onto it, do not rock. The brace you started the rep with is the brace you finish it with.
Drive back up
Push the floor away and bring the hips through. If you have to rock backward first to get moving, you sat down rather than touched.
What goes wrong
Bouncing off the box
The box is a marker for the bottom of the rep. Bouncing off it loads your spine through a surface that does not give, and it hands you a rep the muscles did not do. Touch, hold, stand.
Setting the box high and calling it a squat
This is the one that quietly costs you. A high box turns it into a partial, and partials loaded above what a full squat allows are exactly the pattern a review of over 164 papers named as the one that favors degenerative change in the knee over time, rather than the deep squat everybody worries about1. A high box is a choice with a cost, not a safer default.
Relaxing the trunk once you touch
The moment you sit down properly, the bar is being carried by your spine rather than by a braced trunk, and then you have to re-brace under load to stand up. Every rep should feel like a pause, not a rest.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 70 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 70 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 70 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 70 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 70 kg | Load up 70 kg → 72.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 72.5 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 72.5 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 72.5 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
What is the box actually for?
Consistency and a stopping point you can trust. It also lets you train a shallower position deliberately if that is what you want, which is different from drifting shallow because a set got hard. If you have no reason to fix the depth, a free squat with the same load does more2.
How high should the box be?
As low as you can touch and stand up from with the shape intact. Deeper is better for the front of the thigh, and it is better for the glutes and adductors too: seventeen men training full squats grew those two significantly more than a half squat group at 6.7 against 2.2 per cent and 6.2 against 2.72.
Will Reckoner give me this with a lower back restriction?
No. This one records lower back, neck and shoulder as restrictions. Declare any of them in setup and it comes out of your plan. It does not record a knee restriction, which the barbell back squat and the front squat both do.
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
- Hartmann, Wirth and Klusemann, Sports Medicine, 2013. Analysis of the load on the knee joint and vertebral column with changes in squatting depth and weight load a review of over 164 papers finding the highest kneecap compressive stress at about 90 degrees of knee flexion rather than at the bottom, concluding that concerns about degenerative change from deep squats are unfounded and that half and quarter squats loaded above what a deep squat allows are the pattern that favors degenerative change over time
- Kubo and colleagues, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2019. Effects of squat training with different depths on lower limb muscle volumes seventeen men training full or half squats twice a week for ten weeks, knee extensor volume rising 4.9 per cent against 4.6 per cent with no difference between depths, while the adductors and gluteus maximus grew significantly more in the full squat group at 6.2 against 2.7 per cent and 6.7 against 2.2 per cent, and the rectus femoris did not change in either group