RRR - Isometric belt squats and dead squats

Hello and welcome to another edition of “Reason and Rationale.” Today we are going to talk about isometric belt squats and dead squats. 

Most know of the isometric midthigh pull but what if your grip suffers? Straps help for sure but what about taking out the upper extremity altogether? This is where the belt squat comes in. We’ve seen people use this at the gym in many variations from using a machine to boxes, a belt and a weight. Belt squats have their place so we decided to test it out using the Exsurgo Performance System and the gStrength. 

Following guidelines of the IMTP, we set the athlete in their stance and instructed them to press as hard as they could into the ground. As outlined in the images above, a relatively flat expression of force totalled 274.9kg over 3.9secs. This was the max effort out of multiple attempts. 

At 279.9kg of isometric belt squat force, we then took 75% of that based on studies correlating the IMTP to squats and deadlifts 1RM to establish an e1RM. These studies are what we based our Load Calculator on which you can review as well. 75% of 279.9kg is 209.9kg. Knowing this number means at this angle and body position, our athlete could be able to express this dynamically. 

So we set the pins to match as best we could and began lifting from the pins. This is called a dead squat as the athlete is performing only the concentric phase and then dropping the bar on the pins. There are many benefits to this from learning body position as well as creating tension to move the bar. 

From here, we worked our way up to the calculated load of 209.9kg. There is a great video of this to show success. 

Now you may be wondering, “What are the angles? Do they match? Could we lift it ourselves? What purpose does this serve?” 

Here are the angles for comparison.

Pretty close and ok for what we are doing which is most athletes live around these angles. Very few athletes express force in their sport in a bilateral, compressed, “ass to grass” style squat. 

Our goal here was to compare the isometric force output with the dynamic at the same angles and see if they compare which based on the results could be comparable. This is only one athlete (n = 1) so all the statisticians can relax as we are suggesting more research should be done to see if there is a larger relationship to the Isometric Belt Squat and the Dead Squat at the same angles. 

Some suggest the dead squat is great for RFD and concentric only training. There may be something to that but so far, there is not a lot of research around this area at this time. If there is, please share some sources. 

I hope this was helpful and maybe gets you thinking of ways to add variety to your study ideas and training as you look to find ways to increase your athletes performance. We hope by explaining our reason and rationale this helps you make informed choices and decisions about your research, programming and training methodologies. 

Until next time! 

TeamEXSURGO