reckonerSissy squat
A bodyweight quad exercise where you rise onto your toes, keep your hips straight, and lean back as your knees travel forward. It loads the front of the thigh hard with no machine, which makes it the leg extension for a gym that has none.
Knees forward, hips stay straight.
- Pattern
- Knee isolation
- Trains
- Quads
- Kit
- Bodyweight, sturdy surface
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Hold something sturdy
Stand beside a rack upright or a sturdy post and hold it with one hand. Feet about hip width, then rise onto the balls of your feet. Holding on lets you spend your effort on the quads rather than on balance.
Keep a straight line from knees to shoulders
Squeeze your glutes so your hips stay straight. This line is what makes it a sissy squat rather than an ordinary squat, because it keeps the hip still while the knee bends.
Let the knees travel forward
Bend your knees and let them move forward over your toes as your body leans back. Go only as deep as you can come back up from.
Drive the knees back to stand
Straighten your knees and come back to standing, keeping the hips straight the whole way.
What goes wrong
Bending at the hips
Folding the hips feels safer and makes the rep easier. It turns into an ordinary squat on your toes. Keep the line from knees to shoulders straight.
Going deeper than you can get out of
The way down is easy, so deep feels possible. The bottom is hard to come back from. Start shallow and add depth over weeks, holding on the whole time.
Letting go of the support
Letting go feels like the harder, more honest version. Balance is not the point of this lift. Hold on and spend your effort on the quads.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 | 3 x 10 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 | 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 14 | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three 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
Why do a sissy squat when I already squat?
Squats grew the main quad muscles but not the rectus femoris, the one that crosses the hip, in a ten week trial1. Knee extension with the hip held straight is the gap a leg extension or a sissy squat fills.
How do I make it harder?
Go deeper over the weeks, slow the way down, and hold a weight plate to your chest once bodyweight is easy.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Not by itself. It takes skill to do well, so the engine never chooses it for you. Choose it in the lift picker or as a swap for the leg extension. Knee is recorded against it.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Kubo, Ikebukuro and Yata, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2019. Effects of squat training with different depths on lower limb muscle volumes seventeen men over ten weeks of full or half squats, with knee extensor volume rising in both while rectus femoris and hamstring volume did not change in either group