Mark Ottobre, a strength coach trained by Charles Poliquin, breaks down the Poliquin step-up with precise cues: heel at 12-2 o'clock, toe aligned with heel, locked support leg, and strict lateral weight shift. He corrects common mistakes like forward heel placement and hip misalignment that break the lift's mechanics.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to do a Poliquin step-up. Charles Poliquin was my mentor. I am a PICP Level 5 strength coach. I saw Charles do this in person and get very mad when students didn't do it the correct way. So I know exactly how this was intended to be done, and most tutorials on YouTube completely do them wrong. So first thing we want to do is we want to set up the heel at a high angle. The original where this comes from, just so you know, some history lessons, it was first initially a Peterson step-up. So the Peterson step-up, you'd come up high on your heel, then you would laterally shift onto the other leg, then you would come up and push down, and then you'd come back up and back down. Now what Charles found was most athletes, most people found this too challenging and they weren't able to do it correctly. So he came up with the Poliquin step-up, which is a remedial version of the Peterson step-up. So when we do this, absolutely unacceptable is to do it like this. This is not a Poliquin step-up when the heel is in front. If you did that type of stuff in Charles, he would kick you. And how do I know that? Is I saw him kick people. So what we do is we are up on our heel, we are out slightly. Let's say, you know, 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, no more than 2 o'clock, right? Somewhere in between. You want Your toe in line with your heel, right? Your toe should always be in line with your heel. This leg should be locked out. This is not a straight movement, this is a lateral movement. So if you look at what I'm doing is I'm shifting all the weight onto this leg, then I'm standing up, then I come down. There is no movement. So what a lot of people do when they put it out in front is they reach and they shift their hips. See here what I've done here? This is not correct. I need to be straight, one line up, bar on my back, shift, stand up. Then I'm coming down, 1, 2, straight. And again, my hips should be aligned. So what it shouldn't look like is this. See how my hips aren't aligned now, right? It's, it's quite wide. It should be completely aligned. So I'm shifting the weight up. Yeah. This is how to do a Poliquin step-up.
