Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the past decade, you should know that training your legs is essential to building your perfect physique, whether you’re a girl or guy. The fat burning potential of compound movements such as squats is now widely known, and the boost to growth hormones is also something most guys want to take advantage of. However, for every person performing a perfect squat, there are five out there making a complete fool of themselves!
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1. Go heavy or go home? Not exactly
Next time you squat, take a good honest look at your form in the mirror. Are you really going to parallel or below? You may think you look like a beast squatting 400lbs, but everyone else is actually laughing at you barely going down to 45 degrees. Lose the excessive weight, work on your flexibility, and get that (small-underworked) ass to the grass. Don’t let your form get sloppy at the bottom, though – stop before your lower back begins to round. Your body will thank you as finally you will be bringing your hamstrings, glutes and lower back into play.
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2. Head, shoulders, knees and heels
Squatting with your weight over your toes is dangerous unless you enjoy injuring yourself each gym session. You will not be able to develop any significant strength this way, and if you up the weight you could easily injure yourself. Always make sure you push through your heels but keep all parts of your foot on the floor. You may be limited by how deep you can go due to flexibility – if so, regularly stretch your lower back and calves and this should solve that issue.
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3. Squatting in the smith machine
Stop being scared of the squat rack. Unless you have perfected the free squat, there’s no need to use the smith machine to target specific parts of the leg. Squatting with a barbell means you are using a whole host of additional muscles in order to stabilise the weight. This will also burn even more fat and lead to a more complete and defined physique. In fact, I barely perform any specific abdominal exercises and still stay fairly shredded all year round.
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4. Core values
It’s easy to forget your core when it comes to squats. People become so focused on engaging their quads, hamstrings and glutes that they forget other muscles are required to perform an effective squat. Keeping your core engaged will prevent injury and should also increase strength in the long run, although it may actually mean you have to reduce the weight initially.
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5. You have to go down before you can go up
The downwards part of the squat is just as important as powering the weight up. It may be easier to just let yourself drop to the bottom of the squat, and then try and ‘catch’ the weight when your flexibility starts to limit the movement, but this will limit your strength in the long run. Failing to control the weight will make you more likely to increase the weight unnecessarily, exceeding your body’s capabilities, eventually leading to injury. Lifting less weight but controlling it both down and up will lead to better results in the long run.