Squats

I've been struggling with my knees as some of you due to bike accidents. I've started doing squats at a low weight and have slowly increased over time. It actually feels like my knees are coping much better since I've been doing squats, seem to be getting stronger.

What makes squats such a fantastic exercise?

Builds Muscle in Your Entire Body
Squats obviously help to build your leg muscles (including your quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves), but they also create an anabolic environment, which promotes body-wide muscle building.

In fact, when done properly, squats are so intense that they trigger the release of testosterone and human growth hormone in your body, which are vital for muscle growth and will also help to improve muscle mass when you train other areas of your body aside from your legs.

So squats can actually help you improve both your upper and lower body strength.

Functional Exercise Makes Real-Life Activities Easier
Functional exercises are those that help your body to perform real-life activities, as opposed to simply being able to operate pieces of gym equipment. Squats are one of the best functional exercises out there, as humans have been squatting since the hunter-gatherer days. When you perform squats, you build muscle and help your muscles work more efficiently, as well as promote mobility and balance. All of these benefits translate into your body moving more efficiently in the real world too.

Burn More Fat
One of the most time-efficient ways to burn more calories is actually to gain more muscle! For every pound of additional muscle you gain, your body will burn an additional 50-70 calories per day. So, if you gain 10 pounds of muscle, you will automatically burn 500-700 more calories per day than you did before.

Maintain Mobility and Balance
Strong legs are crucial for staying mobile as you get older, and squats are phenomenal for increasing leg strength. They also work out your core, stabilizing muscles, which will help you to maintain balance, while also improving the communication between your brain and your muscle groups, which helps prevent falls – which is incidentally the #1 way to prevent bone fractures versus consuming mega-dose calcium supplements and bone drugs.

Prevent Injuries
Most athletic injuries involve weak stabilizer muscles, ligaments and connective tissues, which squats help strengthen. They also help prevent injury by improving your flexibility (squats improve the range of motion in your ankles and hips) and balance, as noted above.

Boost Your Sports Performance -- Jump Higher and Run Faster
Whether you're a weekend warrior or a mom who chases after a toddler, you'll be interested to know that studies have linked squatting strength with athletic ability.i Specifically, squatting helped athletes run faster and jump higher, which is why this exercise is part of virtually every professional athlete's training program.

Tone Your Backside, Abs and Entire Body
Few exercises work as many muscles as the squat, so it's an excellent multi-purpose activity useful for toning and tightening your behind, abs, and, of course, your legs. Furthermore, squats build your muscles, and these muscles participate in the regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism and insulin sensitivity, helping to protect you against obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Help with Waste Removal
Squats improve the pumping of body fluids, aiding in removal of waste and delivery of nutrition to all tissues, including organs and glands. They're also useful for improved movement of feces through your colon and more regular bowel movements.

Squats have long been criticized for being destructive to your knees, but research shows that when done properly, squats actually improve knee stability and strengthen connective tissue.

REFERENCES:

i Br J Sports Med
ii Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1989 Jun;21(3):299-303.

Plenty of Body Builders have told me they went from 60 to over 90kg in the begining from squats and diet alone...

Always struggled with squats. Really hurt. But I saw this guy in gym a while ago. Looked great until I saw his legs... That was enough motivation for me. So, I started with pissy weights. People probably wondered wtf is this guy doing. But I have progressed from there and am quite impressed with what I have achieved.

Doing squats are awesome! usually when I put the bar back on the rack, I have to hold onto it or I fall, so knackered my legs are. Love it. just laugh at the okes in the gym that has these huge upper bodies and match sticks for legs...

Absolutely. I don't want to look like that lol. I'm starting to get some decent size now and don't want my legs to lag behind... But yes, love squats and dead lifts... Dead lifts is probably my favourite right now.

mike123 wrote: Plenty of Body Builders have told me they went from 60 to over 90kg in the begining from squats and diet alone...

I can vouch for something similar: When I started gyming, I was like the usual noob and benched/did arms all the time but the max I weighed was 73kgs. Once I introduced squats and deads into my routine, i increased in size to my current 91kg @ 12/13% bf (admittedly over a few years)

Now, squats is what I focus my routine on and if I'm pressed for time on a workout day, I've gone into gym,warmed up and did 4x5 of heavy squats + 1 set of squats to one short of absolute failure and then leave (actually sit down for 10mins then leave )

I must agree - I went from 80 to 105 way back in the early 90's through squats and those beige containers of Weider protein powder.

To this day, I still squat, altough not heavier than bodyweight trying to go for the 20 reps per set. No amount of leg pressing can hurt like that.