December Fitness Challenge

Advent Side Squat

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an advent calendar before…
They generally last for 25 days and you either get a picture or a chocolate or, in the case of the greatest of advent calendars, a small bottle of whisky everyday.

So, seeing as this challenge is for a winter fundraiser it’s really easy for me to jump on the advent bandwagon to make a structure for a challenge.

Meaning:
Day One, you do one rep.
Day Two, you do two reps.
Day Three, you do three reps.
I could go on but I’m sure you get the idea!

The Exercise

I call this the side squat, but just like most exercises it has multiple names.
I’ll stick with the side squat, though.
As you can see it is a unilateral exercise (daft word for one-sided), so we’ll be doing one rep each side.

On day one it’s actually 2 reps (one on each side) and by day 25 it’ll be 50 reps (25 on each side).
No sets, unless you want to, just do the movement the number of times and you’re done.

A couple of notes on technique

I’d suggest keeping the foot flat.
This is mostly a stability thing to keep your ankle and knee safer. It will also keep the focus on the hips, challenging the flexibility and spreading the weight more effectively through the big muscles that do this kind of movement.

If you go up onto the ball of the foot it’ll generally make the movement more knee and quad focused and result in the ankle and knee being less stable.

The other common concern for this kind of movement is the spine position.
You can see in the side view that my low back flattens and moves into a bit of flexion (curving forward).
The amount of times I’ve heard fuss about neutral spines or flat backs and so on is uncountable, and yes it is important, but mainly if you’ve got a weight in your hands or on your back.
Even then you’ve got some margin of error before you’re running the risk of slipping a disc or damaging muscles/tendons or ligaments.
If you’re doing this exercise with just you’re body weight you’re unlikely to do your back any harm, so bear the spine position in mind but don’t worry about it.

Socials

I’ll be filming myself and posting to my Insta story, this’ll get shared on the Move Free CIC story on Instagram and Facebook.
If you’re joining the challenge, please do the same.
Tag us in the video and we’ll add your video to our story too.

Fundraising

This is all part of our winter fundraising campaign, which you can read more about here.

You can also go to our crowdfunding site if you want to make a donation.
If you know how, please add a link to this in your videos.

If you have any thoughts, comments or questions please add them and I’ll get back to you.