Benefits and Workouts of Landmine Squats

“Wake up determined. Go to bed satisfied”

The landmine squats are of the safer options and it’s the greatest exercise for teaching proper squat form in our opinion. Landmine squats are a fantastic low-impact workout that nevertheless has plenty of benefits, whether you’re a complete beginner or training around an injury.

How to Do Landmine Squats

Landmine squats are a front-loaded squat variation that focuses on the Quads, Upper Back, Glutes, and Core muscles. This exercise has a smaller impact on your joints, making it a safer squat alternative, but it still has a lot of benefits, which we’ll go over shortly. But first, have a look at our guide to landmine squatting.

• Equipment and Set-Up

Load the free end of a barbell with weight plates and place it in a landmine attachment. You can still do the landmine squat if your gym doesn’t have a landmine squats.

If you don’t have a landmine attachment, the simplest solution is to secure the barbell’s free end in a wall corner. If you’re concerned about damaging the paint, wrap a cloth around the end of the bar.

You may also make your own “landmine attachment” with a barbell and a weight plate. This strategy is a little more secure than the previous one. Place the free end of a barbell in the centre of a weight plate, then top it with a dumbbell to keep it in place.

Starting Position

• Stand shoulder-width apart with your feet shoulder-width apart.
• With both hands, hold the barbell at chest height (You can secure the weight by interlocking your hands over the bar).

Execution

• Squat down with the weight at your chest, pushing your hips back and bending your knees.
• When your thighs are parallel to the ground, pause for a second.
• Push yourself back up by extending your legs and thrusting your hips forward while still keeping the weight at your chest.
• That counts as one rep. Check out the reps and sets that our personal trainer recommends below! 

• How many sets and reps should you do?

The number of sets and reps you accomplish depends entirely on your or your client’s fitness goals. Strength, hypertrophy, and endurance are the most common exercise goals.

Strength: 5 reps, 5 sets.

Hypertrophy: 8-12 reps, 3-4 sets.

Muscular Endurance: 12+ reps, 3 sets.

When deciding how much weight to use, choose a weight that will make the last two reps of each set a real challenge. Naturally, if you’re exercising to grow strength and thus doing fewer reps, you should use greater weight than if you’re training to improve muscular endurance and doing the necessary reps and sets.

Muscles in the Landmine Squats Worked

The Quads and Glutes are the main muscles worked, but this exercise also works a variety of other muscles in the lower body, upper body, and core. These are some of them:

• Quads
• Glutes
• Scapular Stabilizers
• Obliques
• Rectus Abdominus
• Hamstrings
• Trapezius
• Deltoids

Benefits of Landmine Squats

Let’s go over the advantages now that you know how to do landmine squats. Following that, we’ll go through some of our favourite variants – you’ll certainly want to stay around for those!

Landmine squats are used by many gym users and personal trainers to teach proper squat form. The barbell travels in a fixed range of motion when attached to a landmine. This stops you from leaning forward as you drop into the squat, since if you did, the end of the barbell would dig into your chest during the landmine squat.

As a result, keeping your torso erect during the exercise is nearly impossible. This assures perfect squatting technique, and you’ll get the rewards of solid form when you progress to big barbell squats.

Not only are landmine squats beneficial for novices who are still learning the proper technique, but they are also beneficial for taller people who struggle to get their chest out and end up doing more of a good morning workout than a squat.

Landmine squats are a lot easier alternative if being tall is getting in the way of your training. Front squats are a popular choice for taller lifters, but they can be tough to master.

References:

H. (2021b, May 10). How and why you should do the landmine squat. The Hussle Blog. https://www.hussle.com/blog/how-and-why-you-should-do-the-landmine-squat/