The squat has a been a part of workouts since caveman times (probably) and will still be a part of workouts when we’re all robots living on Saturn (probably). It shapes up legs and bums like a dream, making it a stone-cold timeless classic.
But! There’s more to how to do squats than merely pretending to sit in an invisible chair for a second, before rising up out of that invisible chair, and then repeating. Okay, granted, there’s not much more to it, but there is a bit, such as:
- If you do a squat correctly, you’ll be working all the major muscle groups in the lower back
- To begin with, you don’t need to hold any weights but as you progress you might want to add a medicine ball to hold
- Squats will increase the strength in your knees and hips, and reduce your chance of injury
- According to Peak Fitness, 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, making squats an excellent way to burn those calories!
Here to give you all the whats, whys and hows of the squat in under 180 seconds is personal trainer Rachel Vaziralli. This spot-on video is from a series called Bootcamp For Women by Howcast, but it works just the same if you’re a dude, dude.
How to Do a Squat by Howcast
There are several variations of how to do squats if you want to jazz it up a bit. This typically slick Fitness Blender workout runs through ten of them starting with the basic squat and working up to the jump squat, and asks you for ten repetitions of each – 100 squats in all. We’ll give it a shot if you will!