When it comes to building up your squat I’ve spent many years learning the ropes, I’ve followed nearly every program out there in the last 10 years.
Wendler 5/3/1, yep.
Juggernaut Method, yep.
Conjugate, yep.
5×5, yep.
Squat Everyday, yep.
Over that time one of the commonalities I figured out is that you can’t skip out on your assistance work. It doesn’t matter how good the squat program is by itself, if the assistance work isn’t there, you become very likely to do one or both of the following; get hurt or plateau. Let’s be honest, neither one of these is very fun.
So to avoid getting hurt and plateauing, I’ve put together our list of the top assistance lifts (that everyone can do in their gym) to help build a bigger squat. Plus at the end, I’ve added a few bonus ones that require equipment that are less accessible.
1. Front Squats
When it comes to challenging the quads, core and upper back all at once, you can’t get much better than the front squat. These will expose your weak points and give you a base to work from.
One of the common problems we find is people shifting away from their quads coming out of the hole in the back squat. When training the front squat you can’t get away with this pattern as it becomes extremely hard to keep the bar on your shoulders. Therefore it promotes you to stay balanced between quads and hip drive throughout the movement.
Want to make these even harder, try manipulating the tempo of the movement like a 3 second eccentric and 3 second pause in the hole.
2. Stiff Leg Deadlift
When it comes to squatting one of the big limiters for lifters can be stopping themselves from shifting forward on the way up. Aside from the technical corrections needing to be made, building up the posterior chain strength is necessary to help keep the bar back or recover a lift that’s shifted forward.
The Stiff Leg Deadlift is perfect for building up the posterior chain, particularly building eccentric strength which will help assist in controlling the squat on the way down. Focus on pulling through the glutes and hammies rather than the lower back and finishing with a strong hip drive at the end of the movement.
3. Lunges and Split Squats
Although these include multiple exercise variations I’m cheating the list to include them all in as one. Most of us will have one dominant side and one weaker side. So even when our squat may look symmetrical we may be relying on our dominant side to produce more than 50% of the force required for the lift. This can lead to a few things, over time us developing a compensating pattern in the squat itself and more than likely an injury.
Training split stance work allows us to build the stabilising musculature around the hip, core and feet while also isolating the weaker leg to even out the imbalance. As an added bonus, lunges will build up huge quads and glutes strength that will carry over to bigger squats while also giving you an awesome metabolic effect that will help strip body fat.
4. Ab Rollouts
Now there’s no doubt a strong core goes a long way to a strong squat and there’s plenty of ways to develop midline strength but one of the simplest and most effective movements has to be the ab rollout. I used to be of the belief that all you needed to do to train the core was heavy squats and deadlifts, soon I found myself struggling to hold position in heavy squats. So I decided to include some extra core work, the first thing was ab rollouts and side planks and in 4 weeks I added 10kg onto my 1RM.
The problem is most people perform it in a way that trains the wrong muscles for it to carry over to performance. The correct way to perform a rollout requires a solid hollow body position with the only movement occurring through the shoulder while staying solid at the hip. Check out the video below to see how to perform these properly.
If your gym hasn’t got an ab wheel (or whatever fancy name they give them) just set up a barbell with small plates on it and use that instead.
5. Loaded Carries
So we have already spoken of the importance of core strength in the squat but one of the more overlooked exercises for core strength is loaded carries in all variations. Carries develop stabilisation through the core, hip and feet as they move through space which reduces the risk of injury, teaches the core musculature to function with the surrounding muscles to stabilise the spine and transfer force efficiently.
Some of our favourite carry variations for building core strength for squatting include Yoke Carries, 1 Arm Farmers Carries and KB Front Rack Carries. But if you don’t have the specialist equipment you can just grab a heavy dumbbell or kettlebell and walk with it at either your side or up resting partially on your shoulder. Change up the distances, loads and variations from time to time.
BONUS MOVES
So the above exercises are ones that nearly anyone can do. The bonus exercises will require a bit of extra equipment that not all gyms may have. Don’t worry though, if you do the above 5 you will get strong AF. These are just to keep things a little more exciting and change it up a little.
6. Belt Squats
Find yourself using your back in your squats all the time? The belt squat can be a useful way to strengthen the legs without loading the back further to help them catch up. You can set these up with a dip belt and some jerk blocks or plyo boxes. Check out Nathan in the video below taking you through the belt squat.
Try to stick to higher volume on these like 3-4 sets of 8-20 reps.
7. Glute Ham Raise
These require a GHD or a buddy (the buddy version is significantly harder by the way) and will build massive hammy strength. Unfortunately most anytime fitness style gyms don’t have GHD’s but if you train at an awesome gym, chances are they will have one (if not maybe your gym’s not as awesome as you think :P).
The GHR I’ve found to be a great developer of strength for mainly the deadlift however it allows me to build strength on stiff leg deadlifts faster and therefore also the squat. These can be very hard to start off with so make sure you follow the correct progressions to work your way up to these first.
8. Leg Press / Hack Squat
Now I haven’t personally used either machine in a few years but I’ve seen plenty of people benefit from using the these to build up the squat. The main problem I see is people trying to go way too heavy on these lifts at the expense of range of motion and increasing the risk of injury.
I like seeing them used as a means of building volume in the legs without loading the back (similar to how we use the belt squat).
Wrapping Up
So there’s a bunch of exercises to help you build up the squat. If you’re looking for training methods to apply to these exercises then check out these articles we wrote previously.
3 Simple Tweaks To Heavier Squats
Training Methods Newstrength Athletes Use To Dominate Their Sport
Remember you still need to train the squat while you work on these lifts. If you want a bigger squat you need to squat. Assistance lifts just help fill in the gaps and speed up progress.