Coach Mark Ottobre breaks down Bulgarian split squat form, identifying how a twisted torso and reaching arms kill balance. He shows how to set up with a bench, use a stick for stability, and explains why contralateral loading (opposite leg, opposite hand) activates glutes more than same-leg loading.
Yeah.
Yep, that's how you do it, huh?
Yeah.
Okay, so a few things to fix there. You've got one leg out and you're kind of twisting. At the same time as you're twisting, you're also reaching. Yeah, with this arm, nothing is aligned, which means that what's going to give out is your balance, number one, because this is incredibly difficult to balance. But the other thing is this load is not in our center of mass. Yeah, because otherwise what we're going to get, we're going to get tight arms. So a better way to do this, I want you to sit on something like this, whether it's a bench. I want you to put your knees out like that. Yeah, straighten your legs.
Yeah.
Then I want you to put your feet here and you're going to stand up. This gives an approximate degree of how far you should be from the bench or the implement that we're going to rest upon. So we do want a degree of stability here. So I would recommend you hold on to something. If you don't have something like this to hold on to, you can get a trusty stick and you can use that as a counterbalance. There's 2 ways we can do this. We can do same leg with load, or we could do contralateral, which is opposite leg, opposite hand.
Yeah.
Now, if we want to utilize the glute a bit more, I would recommend contralateral. Why is because as we put load on this hand, what's going to happen is our body wants to shift this position, but we're not going to let it. We're going to keep in this position, which means that the opposing glute, the one that's working, has to pull the forces to this direction. Yeah, counteralateral, and then we're going to come all the way down and all the way up. But that's not all. As we go down, if this shin angle is diagonal, it's going to be working more of the quad. If we want to make it more glute focused. We need to make that shin angle more vertical.
Okay.
