[quote author="TW1573D RE4PE12" date="1267500562"]
Do you guys think this type of squat is effective or useful? It looks good for people who don’t have access to a weight room. The intermediate variant seems to be easier to do than the pistol, but the advanced version requires way more strength and is much harder to do than the pistol. There is also a harder variation of the shrimp that Ido has yet to introduce.
I wouldn’t waste my time with this one. (1)It doesn’t resemble any sprint movement. (2) the load is too low to be of any benefit to contractile or elastic tisuue needed for sprinting.
But if you were to jump/hop up to a height of 30cm wth very quick foot-ground contact time of 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds) you would generate 2000N of force (equivalent to 203kg) which is more than enough for the first few steps of sprinting.
The exercise is for sprinting right?[/quote]
I don’t believe this exercise is specifically for sprinting. I found this while looking for harder bodyweight squat variations on the internet because I don’t have access to barbells and we only did bodyweight lunges for leg exercises in practice. So when I saw this exercise (advanced shrimp) I tried it and could not do it so I thought it might be a good alternative to barbell squats and I heard some people say that being able to do this will be able to do a double bodyweight squat. The bad thing I noticed was that it looked like it uses more quads than glutes, but I think keeping your knees behind your toes while squating will solve this.
From Ido’s Blog:
The advanced variation will be to grab ahold of the back foot in a quad stretch position and slowly while pulling forward and up and using no momentum, stand up. Come down the same way and repeat for reps.
The advanced variation is the hardest body weight exercise I ran into until today. I dont need to take my shoes off to count the number of people I have witnessed performing this correctly (no momentum and in the correct positioning) and I have challanged some heavy squaters and heavy pistol practitioners.
The reason is a the bad mechanical advantage of the movement of course. Try it, it is a humbling experience.
Having said that, it is not the hardest variation of the exercise… but we will leave something for the future!