The Squat: King Of All Exercises - Part 2

In Part 1 we took a holistic look at the importance of squatting in everyday life and some of the reasons why we, and some of the best strength and conditioning coaches around, think the squat is the ‘King of All Exercises’.


Today we’ll look at practical considerations when squatting as part of your workout - what makes a good squat, squatting technique, common muscular restrictions, and progressions if you’re currently unable to perform a full squat.

So why is the full squat such a great exercise?

At 3D Personal Training we use the full squat for weight loss, total body toning, strength training, conditioning, increasing athletic and sporting performance, increasing joint stability, and injury reduction amongst others. It’s not just an exercise for the big guys down at the gym but something everyone can enjoy whether you choose to use weights at all or throw 80kg on each side of the bar.

The reason it’s so effective is that it works pretty much every muscle in your body – and at upper end of the load and/or intensity scale it’ll even work the small muscles in your face. (1)

When pretty much every muscle in your body is getting a workout, a tremendous number of calories are burned. Squatting also adds active tissue – muscle - all over your body, and as we know adding active tissue is essential to weight loss because muscle has a high energy requirement even when not working. That muscle also aids in joint stability and injury reduction, sporting performance, and overall body tone. Not bad for a single exercise!

In short, it’s fantastic for anyone who wants to lose weight, tone up, improve their performance, is time limited or just look and feel their best.

What makes a good full squat?

The first and foremost consideration is avoiding the risk of injury through proper technique, and we can achieve that by setting ourselves up correctly, descending into the squat and ascending from the squat with good form. In figures 1 – 4 below we show good squat technique:

To check out the rest of this article please follow the link http://www.3dpts.com/articles/squat_part_2.html