reckonerWall sit
Back against a wall, slide down until your thighs are level, hold. Nothing moves, which makes it the easiest hard thing in the library to set up: no kit, no space, no skill. It also happens to be the exercise with the strongest evidence behind it for lowering blood pressure.
Sit to thighs level, back on the wall.
- Pattern
- Knee isolation
- Trains
- Quads
- Kit
- Bodyweight, wall
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 holds of 30 to 60 seconds
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Find a flat wall and set your back against it
Whole back flat, shoulders and hips both in contact. Feet about hip width and a stride out in front of you.
Slide down to thighs level
Sit to thighs level, back on the wall. That is the cue on your wrist. Knees end up at about a right angle and your shins finish close to vertical.
Check where your feet are
If your knees are pushed forward over your toes, walk the feet further out. If your feet are so far out that you are sliding down, bring them in. Vertical shins is the target.
Hold, and breathe
Hands off your thighs. Breathe normally rather than holding your breath, which is the part people get wrong and the part that matters for what this exercise is best at.
What goes wrong
Sitting too high
Stopping above thighs level makes the hold much easier and it is the first thing that goes when a set gets long. If you have to creep up the wall to finish the time, the time was too long. Shorten it and hold the position properly.
Resting your hands on your thighs
Pushing down on your legs takes a surprising amount of weight off them. Arms folded or hanging at your sides is the honest version, and it is what makes one week's hold comparable to the next.
Holding your breath
Bracing hard and holding your breath through an isometric drives blood pressure up during the set, which is the opposite of the effect this exercise is best evidenced for. In a network meta-analysis of 270 trials, isometric training lowered resting blood pressure more than any other mode at 8.24 over 4.00 millimeters of mercury, and the wall squat ranked as the single most effective isometric exercise for the upper number1. Breathe through it.
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 30 s | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 2 | 3 x 40 s | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 3 | 3 x 50 s | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 4 | 3 x 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. |
| 5 | 3 x 60 s | 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 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. 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
How long should I hold a wall sit?
Reckoner records this as a movement measured in time and prescribes the hold, so the answer comes from your plan rather than from a rule of thumb. What matters more is that the position is the same each time, because a longer hold at a higher sit is not progress.
Is a wall sit actually worth doing?
For the quads it is a supplement rather than a main lift, because nothing moves and there is no load to add beyond your own weight and the clock. For resting blood pressure the evidence is unusually strong, and it was the top ranked isometric mode in a meta-analysis pooling 15,827 participants1.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Knee is the only restriction recorded against it. Declare one in setup and it comes out of your plan.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- Edwards and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2023. Exercise training and resting blood pressure: a large-scale pairwise and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials 270 randomized controlled trials pooling 15,827 participants, isometric training lowering resting blood pressure by 8.24 over 4.00 millimeters of mercury against 4.55 over 3.04 for dynamic resistance training, and the wall squat ranking as the single most effective isometric mode for the upper number