The Sumo Stomp Squat

Good Memorial Day Monday morning to you!

I hope your weekend was an awesome one, and that you’re ready to learn a new exercise — the Sumo Stomp Squat — a great one for building up your leg muscles and having a healthy butt.

As the recently departed Charles Poliquin used to say, “There’s nothing uglier than a man whose torso is suing his ass for lack of support.”

As funny as that sounds, you see this a lot in gyms among bodybuilders who have big lats and shoulders but dried-up prunes for butts.

That one thing tells me they aren’t integrating their trunks and legs very well, and it isn’t getting many women excited either!

Be warned this exercise will fire up the fast-twitch muscle fibers in your butt and legs in a big hurry. I would start with just one simple set with no extra weights until you see how your body reacts to doing it.

Assume the position…

For this exercise, you’ll drop into a low squat position like a sumo wrestler and stomp the floor with your feet. For beginners who just want to use their body weight to perform it, 20 stomps are a good goal for your first set.

Because performing the Sumo Stomp Squat can create some noticeable delated onset muscle soreness, I recommend just one set in the beginning and waiting three full days before doing it again.

Once your thighs get below the parallel level, your pelvis will try to roll back so if you’ve got ANY CONCERNS about your lumbar discs, DON’T DO THIS EXERCISE!

For those of you who are in good condition and have healthy spines, however, letting your back round a little bit in this natural movement will help to strengthen the posterior ligamentous complex and shouldn’t cause any problems.

In fact, we used to do movements like this out in nature all the time. If you think about the activities of daily living or the common movements of a carpenter picking up boards off the ground, these are not things that anyone with a healthy body should have a hard time doing.

As I demonstrate in my vlog, when it comes to adding weights, you’ll want to proceed slowly and progressively because it can overload your posterior ligamentous complex and lumbosacral ligaments as well as the ligaments attached to the lumbar vertebrae.

If you do three plates per side normally in a regular squat (about 315 pounds), I recommend starting with just 20 percent of that weight for the Sumo Stomp Squat, then build from there.

Also, I’ll show you a couple of ways to do it with barbells all by themselves or mixing it in with a set of squats.

If learning the Sumo Squat Stomp makes you curious about how to design exercises, you may want to consider my CHEK Exercise Coach program!

Hope to see you there!

Love and chi,

Paul