About a month ago I posted excitedly that my gym had installed a new plate loaded belt squat machine.

I was eager to program it in, and now finally having had the chance to use it, wow!

It’s very comfortable, once you find a good angle. At first, my instinct was to sit very far back and upright to make it more like a hack squat motion. This provided a great quad stimulus, but the belt actually applied a ton of unwanted pressure to the inner thighs, and my training partner and I both ended up with big bruises on our adductors lol.

So the following week, we stepped forward, and angled our torsos to mimic a traditional squat posture. Despite this, the belt continues to dramatically reduce pressure on the back compared to a barbell squat, which is great. The belt and pulley also has much more room between your legs, so it glides freely without causing any bruising.

After finding my flow with the machine, I Iove it!

I’m someone who prides myself on being able to bring sets of heavy barbel squats to failure, but it has its downsides. For one, it’s just very mentally demanding, and there is a fear factor to overcome. Setting the weight down on the safeties after concentric failure is highly technical and while I believe it’s worth learning and practicing, it’s something I hesitate to teach others.

But the belt squat? Forget about it lol, you got one more! Take every heavy set to failure with no fear in your heart. The machine is also very easy to spot- you basically just stand opposite the person and deadlift the plates up. With that in mind, it’s actually also an amazing machine to do some super maximal eccentrics as an intensity variation. Once you hit failure, have your spotter minimally help you out of the hole, then do another super slow eccentric.

In that manner, it has several big advantages over a leg press/hack squat. I really haven’t found a way to meaningfully help someone out of the hole in a leg press. The belt squat also allows for complete freedom of motion, so it should work well for every body type.

All in all, 10/10! Very excited to progress with it for the rest of this program. It can also be used for many other exercises, such as RDLs, rows, shrugs, and more. I’ve taken to using it for standing calf press, which looks quite odd but is very effective. Since this is not an advertisement I don’t want to name the machine, but I will mention the plates travel directly up and down a tower, and it has a 1:1 weight ratio throughout the range of motion. Many other machines use a large lever to move the weight with a variable force curve, so I can’t comment on that style