reckonerVest squat
A bodyweight squat with a weighted vest on. The load sits close to your trunk and stays there, so nothing about the movement changes except that it is heavier. That is the appeal: it is the cheapest way to keep a squat progressing when you have no rack.
Sit back, keep the heels down.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, weight vest
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Fit the vest tight before you start
It should sit against your ribs with no room to shift. A vest that swings on the way down is a load that arrives late, and you will feel it as a shove rather than as weight.
Set your feet as you would with no vest
About shoulder width, toes turned out a few degrees. The vest does not change where your feet belong. It changes how much they have to push.
Sit back, keep the heels down
The cue on your wrist, and it matters more with a vest on, because the extra weight sitting high makes it easier to tip forward onto the front of the foot.
Squat to the depth you had without it
Then stand all the way up. If the vest costs you depth, it is heavier than your legs today, and a shallower squat under more weight is a trade you did not mean to make.
What goes wrong
Letting the vest buy you a shorter rep
This is the fault the vest creates. Adding load and losing range at the same time reads on paper as progress and is not: the deep half of a twelve week comparison gained 4 to 7 per cent more front thigh cross-sectional area than the shallow half1. If the depth goes, the vest comes off.
Wearing it loose
A loose vest turns every rep into a small collision at the bottom and puts the load somewhere your brace was not expecting. Tighten the straps until it moves with your chest and not after it.
Logging the vest weight and the exercise separately in your head
Reckoner records the vest load as the load on this movement, and it steps in small increments because a vest does. Log what you actually wore. A set logged with a load you did not have on is a set the engine will progress from.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 11 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 1 kg to 11 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 11 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 11 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
Vest squat or goblet squat?
The vest if you want the movement unchanged and your hands free, the goblet if you want the counterweight in front that helps you stay upright and reach depth. They are separate records here, so you can use both.
How much should a vest weigh?
Whatever still lets you squat to the depth you had without it. That is the whole test and it is a better one than any percentage, because the point of the vest is a heavier squat rather than a shorter one.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either 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
- 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