by Andrew Coates
How to Do It and the Mistakes to Avoid
The box squat is perfect for both advanced and beginner lifters. Here’s how to get it right and what to avoid at all costs.
When done correctly, the box squat is one of the best tools to help you perfect the standard squat. But like any exercise, if you do it poorly, it’ll leave scars. Here’s how to get it right.
How to Box Squat Correctly
- Start with a box or bench appropriate to your goals. With time and skill, use lower boxes.
- A good default setup includes feet at hip width and toes pointed outward, but adjust to your anatomy, mobility, or squat goals.
- Lock your chin in a neutral position with your collarbones and ribcage down. Get your hips and ribcage stacked and neutral with each other.
- Breathe in and brace with air in your core.
- Move your hips down and back simultaneously. You can focus on a more vertical shin angle for painful or injured knees by sitting further back on the box with more emphasis on hip flexion.
- Touch down with control, pause for 1-2 seconds, and reverse direction without rocking.
- Squat tall to finish with fully extended and stacked hips and knees.
- Breathe, brace, and repeat.
Avoid These Common Mistakes
1. Rocking
A good box squat is a controlled squat. Rocking means you’re using too much load and need to use momentum to break the pause at the bottom. You want to maintain a consistent torso position as you touch down and pause.
2. Relaxing at the Bottom
No one relaxes at the bottom of a squat. You brace to maintain breath and core tension through the bottom. This helps prevent excessive lumbar flexion or extension under heavy load at the bottom. It also lessens the likelihood you’ll lose the strength coming out of the hole. None of this changes when you’re squatting to a box.
3. Losing Tension and Control
Failing to control the bottom portion means you need more skill work or you’re using too much weight. The answer to both? Lighten the load and practice control.
One of the main reasons to box squat is learning this control, so you might as well practice and get it right. Any time you’re under significant load you want to maintain control through the range of motion you have access to. If you force a range of motion you can passively get into – but can’t actively control, especially under heavy load – you increase injury risk.
4. Bouncing
People bounce in an attempt to use the stretch reflex to generate spring and momentum out of the hole. Controlled use of stretch reflex is a smart strategy when freely squatting, but unwise when landing hard on your tailbone trying to create bounce momentum. This increases injury risk to your spine.
5. Using Too Much Weight
All of these mistakes are based on lack of control or using too much load. Lighten the load to work on the skill. Too much load usually shows up as rocking or bouncing.
6. Using a Box that’s Too High or Too Low
Sometimes you don’t have a lot of options, but most gyms have an assortment of benches, plyo boxes, or stackable risers. Even piling up plates makes for an easily adjustable box height.
A box that’s too high leads to ego-lifting. A box that’s too low may cause you to lose control through the bottom end of the range or run out of hip mobility and find more flexion in your lumbar spine than intended. Either may increase injury risk or reduce the intended training effect. As you develop skill and control at the bottom, gradually work with lower boxes.
7. Skimming the Box
Sometimes lifters try to graze the box or time their touch so they don’t even make contact. Virtually all of the reasons to use a box involve learning control at the bottom – using a pause. If you’re skilled enough to do paused squats, don’t bother with the box. Otherwise, touch down, hold your brace, pause to dissipate the stretch reflex, and then stand up.
Why Box Squat?
1. Training Wheels
Some beginners possess a natural body awareness and athleticism where a quick demonstration produces near mastery. And some resemble a baby giraffe on ice even with extensive practice. For the latter, giving them a target and an external point of reference helps. Many people struggle with proprioception (awareness of body position and movement in space), especially when moving outside their visual range. Instead of over-reliance on mirrors, give them something to sit on so they know they won’t fall.
The surface area of your feet is the only contact point with stable external reference points. A moment of stable contact with the box provides more external reference to give you a sense of where you are in space. Once a new lifter develops some proprioception, they can take off the training wheels.
2. A Target
Too many gym regulars squat above parallel. When assessed for hip mobility or tasked with a deeper squat with light load, most possess the range of motion to squat below parallel. Using a box provides a depth target to train yourself to squat deeper, improve proprioception of depth, and eventually hit real depth without a target.
3. A Barrier
Some squat too deep for their skill level. They dive-bomb their squats and struggle with their awareness of depth. They don’t create much muscular tension during the negative.
Instead, they rely on a hard bounce from stretch reflex at the bottom, impact at their knees, and experience total loss of pelvic stability and uncontrolled lumbar flexion/extension. A box is a useful teaching tool to learn control and proprioception. You’ll learn to anticipate touching down and to decelerate and control the squat through the bottom.
4. Developing Strength and Control at the Bottom of a Squat
Most reasons to box squat involve pausing for a second or two at the bottom. For pure strength, we want to benefit from the stretch reflex at the bottom, but it’s also valuable to get stronger at the weakest part of your strength curve. Pausing dissipates the elastic rebound of your stretch reflex, forcing your quads to do more of the work to push out of the hole. By removing rocking, bouncing, and momentum, you’re forced to push from a strict paused position and maximize quad tension.
5. Dealing with Pain and Injury
Some knee, hip, ankle, and even low-back injuries restrict full range of motion while free squatting, but tolerate a restricted range of motion. The box squat allows you to sit back with a vertical shin, more than free squats permit. Less forward shear through the knee may alleviate pain so you can continue to squat, even if you’re restricted to a more hip-dominant version. Ideally, you want to develop the tolerance to have your knee cross in front of your toes, but sometimes you need to build back up to this.
6. Novel Training Stimulus
Always doing the same exercise gets mentally stale, creates low-grade joint irritation, and feels like you’re not getting as much pump. Making a slight alteration of the same exercises, or substituting a closely related alternative that also stimulates muscle, is all you need to feel more mentally engaged, experience less discomfort, and get better workouts.
