If you’re a serious gym goer, chances are you have been grasping at straws to find the perfect exercise that will enhance the muscles within your thighs. Most leg day exercises are known to give you increased strength in the legs but typically fall short of a full leg workout that gives you the results you want. That’s where the benefits of wall sit exercises come in.
A wall sit exercise is not hard to execute at all, which you will find to be the first notable benefit, aside from the fact that you can do them anywhere, whether you are at home, a hotel room, or wherever your life takes you, all you need is a wall and your body weight, as wall sits are a body weight bearing exercise. All you have to do is plant those feet on the ground, two feet from the wall, shoulder-width apart, with your knees in line with your ankles, slowly slide down and hold for 30 seconds to a minute, depending on your abilities and whether or not you’re a beginner, and then raise yourself back up, and stand up from there, and your exercise is complete.
Isometric Strength
The benefits of wall sits are never ending. The biggest benefit from wall sits (aside from being easy to perform) is that they increase your isometric strength. What exactly is isometric strength? Well, isometric exercises or any type of isometric training means that the exercise you’re doing does not change your muscle length and joint angle at the point of contraction. This means, that if you have any problems with a particular joint at any given angle when lifting or moving, Isometrics allows you to isolate that joint, further improving your condition. Further according to makingmuscle.com, the body is also able to use isometrics to activate all of its available motor units, which is actually very hard to achieve without isometrics or any other training methods. Isometric training is also a form of not only isolation but a form of using your bodyweight for strength and endurance enhancement that allows you to train with your body against a sitting still object. Any form of isometric training can increasingly improve the health of your heart because this exercise requires your resting heart rate to stay a normal pace. Wall sits can, in turn, allow your heart to not work as hard and it is said that “a heart that does not work as hard all of the time, can stay healthier for longer.”
Stamina
Because wall sits allow you to focus on your muscles as a whole, you can see how it can not only improve your leg strength but further improve your stamina by increasing leg strength. This allows you to execute other exercises more efficiently and easily that you wouldn’t normally be able to perform as easily from just a regular squat or lunge.
Focus
Wall sits are all said to increase your mind’s ability to focus. Because wall sits inherit a form of martial arts with a side of yoga principles, when performing a wall sit properly, it requires an extreme level of focus and awareness of what you are doing. With that type of focus and concentration, wall sits can easily allow your body to be more flexible, in the sense that your posture improves and gets used to the wall sit movement. This can make you feel a little more light and airy once you have included the wall sit into your regimen more frequently.
Balance
Now that we have established that wall sits make you stronger, increase flexibility and can further improve focus and concentration, it will come to no surprise that another added benefit that comes from performing wall sits is that you can improve your balance. Because you have to lean up against a wall with no support at all and perform the exercise on your own, the level of focus and concentration aiding you in balancing can improve your body’s ability to balance as a whole as your go through daily life.
Build Muscle
In addition to the laundry list alread discussed, wall sits are also known to strengthen and tone your calves and abs. This exercise focuses on transferring your body weight to your calves and thighs. That means that all of your weight is transferred to those areas, and you must use your calves and thighs to raise yourself back up in an upward position, further toning those thighs, and because this workout calls for those abdominal muscles to be held in place with force while performing this exercise, with regular breathing and no slouching, your abdominal strength will improve tremendously.
Multi-Task
Wall sits are also versatile and can allow you multitask. You can change up your routine by adding weights or even change the way that you perform a wall sit in general to amp up your exercise, whether you choose to use one leg or the other at a time to improve weakness imbalances, you will certainly be able to get the most of your wall sit exercises through versatility alone. As far as multitasking is concerned, with a wall sit you can easily “watch tv, listen to music or even do curls with a dumbbell as you sit up against a wall”. Getting creative to get the most of your wall sit exercise while decreasing your stress through multitasking activities that you find enjoyable can tack on the added benefit of stress relief.
Burn Fat
Wall sits, of course, aren’t exactly cardio, but any exercise that increases the muscles to use energy can in fact burn calories, so when it comes to weight loss goals, although you won’t burn as many calories as you would through other exercises, wall sits still allow the burning of some calories while the focus remains to strengthen and tone.
Wall sits definitely allow the leg day boost you need by really toning the thighs, glutes, hamstrings, abs, lower back and calves while improving your focus and self-awareness as you perform your hold. In order to reap all the rewards from the benefits we mentioned, the one thing you must always make sure of is that your form is pristine and your efforts consistent. Starting your hold for 30 seconds and slowly increasing over time will definitely help you achieve your leg day goals.
