Read Video Text Below:
Hi, David Weck here. Today, we're going to teach you an exercise called the Money Maker.
It's a squat on the BOSU Elite using a counter weight. This is a great primer squat to enhance the quality of your ground based squat. It forces you to engage the hip flexors and strengthens the back extensors exceptionally well. The way the BOSU Elite is set up helps us to maintain perfection through the center of the body and lets the rest of the body serve the center, rather than the other way around, making us better on the ground.
I got a kettle bell here for a weight. Dumbbell, kettle bell, any kind of a weight for resistance will work. I'm going to use this as a counter weight. The further out I hold it, the more challenging it will be. I'm going to go from mid range here.
[For proper squat form on the BOSU Elite], I put my toes behind the Power Line, so my toes are up. I've got my big toes right behind the notch between the twos and the fours. You can see my toes are behind the power line. My feet are relatively straight ahead for this one. I'm going to use the counter weight and I'm going to actively think of pulling myself down with my hip flexors. I'm going to stay nice and upright with my spine. I want to let my heels be as low as possible, I don't want to grab with my toes. I want to feel that position, nice and rooted to connective tissue, where I can bounce in the hole.
Now I can come up, flip the kettle bell and do a little counter weighting movement by raising the weight and making it more challenging, further intensifying the action through the hip flexors and the thoracic spine. I'm going to bring it down, come down into the hole nice and upright, not grabbing with the toes. I'm going to take the weight and bring it up overhead. What happens there is, reflexively, I came up because I couldn't hold it down. Take another rep, pull it down. Now I want to hold myself down with the hip flexors, take the back extensors to really balance and find that position, and now up.
Doesn't take many of those and now when you come on the ground, everything's cued in to improve the quality, depth, tiding, congruous total integration of the squat. I'm going to show you what happens through my base of support and through my center. From the side, same exact set up, I'm going to come down and you can see my center and heels. My heels are lower than my feet right now, taking all the slack out, positive shin angle. When I come down, the heels are going to raise up a little bit, but my center has no butt wink, perfect position. Bringing the weight up, tough work, I balance myself and then bring it on up.
You want to do, generally, about three to five quality repetitions of that exercise and you can use that as a primer set to improve your next reps and sets of ground based squats. The more you do that, the more you're going to tie in, neurologically, this relationship of center-over-base, where center is perfect and the base learns to serve the center. If I just do it on the ground, the ground does not yield. At some point in time and depth, most people will have to tuck the tail under, create that butt wink on the ground and let the center start serving the base. That's not what we want to do, we want to keep a perfect center and teach everything else how to serve the center. The money maker delivers that big time. It's a fantastic exercise, check it out and make your squats better immediately.
