reckonerSit-to-stand squat
Sit down onto a seat, stand back up. The seat sets the depth and gives you somewhere to stop, which makes this the squat you can do when a full one is not available yet. It is also the movement human independence is measured by, which is worth knowing before you dismiss it.
Sit to the seat, stand up. No lower.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, sturdy surface
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Find a stable seat at about knee height
A dining chair, a bench, a solid box. Something that will not slide, tip or roll. Higher is easier, lower is harder, and the height is the dial you turn as you get stronger.
Stand in front of it with your feet under you
Feet about hip width, heels a few inches out from the seat. Close enough that you sit down onto it rather than reaching back for it.
Sit to the seat, stand up. No lower
That is the cue on your wrist and it is the whole rule. Lower down under control until you touch the seat, then stand straight back up. The seat is the bottom of the rep.
Use your hands only if you need them
Arms folded across the chest is the honest version. If you need to push off your thighs to stand, do it, and note that you did, because the day you stop needing to is progress worth seeing.
What goes wrong
Dropping onto the seat
Falling the last few inches skips the hardest part of the rep, which is the bottom. Lower under control the whole way and touch lightly. If you cannot control the last few inches, the seat is too low today.
Rocking forward to get momentum
Swinging the torso forward to throw yourself up is how everybody stands out of a low chair in real life, and it means your legs did less. Keep the chest moving in one piece and stand up on your legs.
Treating it as not real training
It is a real measure of a real thing. In 628 adults aged 60 to 93, leg power worked out from standing repeatedly out of a chair predicted maximum walking speed better than grip strength or a laboratory leg extension measure did1. Getting better at this is getting better at something that matters.
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 | 4 x 5 | 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 | 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 | 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 | One more set 4 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five sets next week. |
| 5 | 5 x 8 | 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 | 3 x 8 | Holding steady No changeYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no load left to add to this lift. It stays at eight reps while Reckoner looks for the next lever. The lighter week is over, so this is back to five 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
How do I make this harder?
Lower the seat, slow the lowering down, and pause when you touch. When a low seat with a slow descent is easy on both legs, the next steps in the library are a bodyweight squat and then a loaded one.
Is this just a squat to a box?
The same shape, a different job. A box squat is a loaded barbell lift where the box fixes a depth you have already chosen. This one is a bodyweight movement where the seat is what makes the rep possible at all, and Reckoner keeps them as separate records because they progress differently.
Will Reckoner take this out of my plan for an injury?
No. This is one of the few movements in the library with no restrictions recorded against it at all, which is why it stays available when the other squats do not. That is not a promise it is right for you, and a specific injury is still a conversation for whoever is treating 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
- Alcazar and colleagues, Scientific Reports, 2020. Relation between leg extension power and 30-s sit-to-stand muscle power in older adults 628 community-dwelling adults aged 60 to 93, power measured from standing out of a chair correlating with laboratory leg extension power at 0.75 and predicting maximum walking speed better than grip strength, the repetition count itself, or the laboratory measure