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The Benefits of Squats
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The Benefits of Squats
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The Benefits of Squats

Strength, Muscle Development, Mobility, Bone Density, Speed — What *Can't* Squatting Do for You?!

Squats occupy a funny place in the exercise pantheon. They’re pretty much universally acknowledged as a phenomenal exercise, a “kingmaker” capable of helping you build slabs of muscle, jump higher and run faster, but they are also, simultaneously, the most skipped exercise by far, and for very good reason: done properly, squats are a brutal test of not only strength but also will.

On any given night, in any given gym in the world, the bench press is perpetually occupied, but the real squatters, hitting depth with good form, are few and far between. What this means, though, is that the crown is in the gutter, so to speak, waiting for you to pick it up. Want to achieve what others can’t? Do what they won’t. And squats, year after year, top that list.

RELATED: The Benefits of Push-Ups

Let’s set aside the fact that squats are hard, though, and focus on the positive: squats are good for you. Squats, in fact, are very good for you — and not just in terms of muscle development. If you need some motivation to put squats back into your routine, read on to learn some of the unsung benefits of doing squats.


5 Reasons You Should Be Squatting Regularly


If you aren't already sold on squatting, here are five good reasons to program them in your next routine:

#1 Squats Are a Phenomenal Total-Body Muscle Builder

You probably associate squats with leg day (that dreaded leg day!), and for good reason: squatting heavy weight is easily the best way to add size and strength to your quads, hamstrings and glutes. But squatting heavy weight actually engages far more muscles than just those in your lower body.

First, stabilizing the weight requires a strong core (which is why you should be holding a breath in on the descent), including both your abdominal muscles and your lower back, as well as strong shoulders and a strong upper back. Squatting may not be direct shoulder work, comparable to a vertical pressing movement, but it does engage your entire shoulder girdle in keeping the weight stable, with your traps, delts and rhomboids working hard to keep your upright posture keep the weight in the optimal position for your legs to drive it upward.

And as if that weren’t enough, squats also hit the notoriously-hard-to-train calves, helping you add some mass to the lower half of your legs and hopefully feel less self-conscious rocking shorts.

#2 Squatting Improves Your Mobility

You don’t even need to use weights to benefit from the mobility gains of regular squatting, but adding weight can actually increase your depth and thereby deepen the stretch. Here’s a hard-hitting truth: lots of people who think they hate squats or suck at squatting actually have terrible mobility. If you can’t comfortably squat to depth, without a barbell on your shoulders, you should take that as a mobility red flag and start working on opening up your hips and gaining flexibility in your quads and hamstrings.

And if you already do have the mobility and can squat correctly, programming regular squats into your routine is a great way to maintain that mobility. Lately, it’s become popular to program hypertrophy leg routines around the leg press, and there are absolutely good reasons to do that, but even bodybuilders looking to maximize time under tension and minimize their recovery needs should still incorporate bodyweight squats into their workouts, if only to maintain that flexibility into the future. We love the leg press (we swear), but as a mobility movement, it loses out to the barbell squat hands down.

#3 Heavy Squats Boost Hormone Production

Without getting too deep into the science, your body doesn’t just have a muscular response to weight training; it also has a hormonal response, designed to prepare you for the heavy workout and prepare your body for similar levels of effort in the future. And those added hormones (mostly testosterone and human growth hormone) do all kinds of great things in and for your body, from building and repairing muscle to increasing your sex drive, improving bone density, and helping you to shed excess body fat.

If that sounds great, we’ve got even better news: no exercise creates the same high endocrine response as squats — not the bench press, not the deadlift, not the barbell row or the standing press. That’s because of the sheer number of muscle motor units (sorry, more science jargon) recruited to complete a squat, more than any other single exercise, and the heavier you go (relative to your own strength levels), the greater the muscle motor unit recruitment.

In other words, the old school lifters were right on this one: heavy squats executed to depth will quite literally transform your entire body, inside and out.

#4 Squats Will Make You More Athletic

Whether you’re a competitive athlete or just want to impress your buddies in a weekend game, increased speed and explosive power is one of the main goals of weight training, and no single exercise better contributes to your speed and jumping ability than the squat. Don’t even take it from us: take it from Olympic-level sprinters, who regularly squat between two and three times their body weight for a single rep.

One simple calculation you can do for a rough assessment of your own athleticism is the “strength to weight” ratio, with your one-rep squat number plugged in for the strength part of the equation. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds but can squat 300 pounds, you have a squat-to-weight ratio of two. Another man, who may weigh 200 pounds and is able to squat 350 pounds, is stronger in absolute terms but weaker in relative terms, and probably won’t be able to jump as high or run as fast as the first man.

#5 There Are Endless Squat Variations

The barbell back squat may get top billing, but there are in fact many, many variations of the squat itself, from the simple front squat to the more complex and challenging Bulgarian split squat. You can vary the weight (barbell, kettlebell, dumbbell, sandbag), its placement (back, shoulders, overhead), and your stance (single-leg or double-leg), and you can adjust tempo and reps to pursue different goals. For example, you can take 10% of your one-rep barbell back squat and use it to jump squats to improve your explosiveness, or you can eliminate the weights entirely and just use the squat movement to improve flexibility in your ankles, knees and hips.

The point here is that it should be impossible to get bored of squatting, because there’s so much potential variety to choose from and so many different ways to program the exercise.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, how experienced or inexperienced you are as a lifter; the humble squat has an important role to play in helping you build a stronger, faster, more agile and flexible body.

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