Thoughts.

The squat.

This is the simplest (and most complicated) lift you can do. It is the easiest (and hardest) lift you can perform. It is the most beneficial (and most dangerous) lift you can perform.

It is a lift you absolutely need to be doing.

This lift does far more than simply train your legs. It’s not simply a lift you do to get big. This is a movement, and its benefits will carry over to all aspects of your life, if done correctly. It makes you stronger and healthier.

Avoiding the squat invites a host of nagging aches and pains, most notably in the back and knees. The hip strengthening that comes from effective squatting is a panacea to your back and knee woes–when your hips are actually able to carry their load of the work, it saves your knees from taking more force than they have to–and you’ll develop a range of motion and core strength that allows your back to stay in a more natural position, unperturbed by stress and torque from weak/tight muscles.

I’m going to preface the descriptive part of this post with a warning: Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust me as though I’m a certified fitness professional or your doctor (ask me in 10 years when I’ve got my MD and a few trainer certs under my belt). Don’t jump headlong into heavy weight training if you’ve never done it before (or if you haven’t in a long while). The risks of overdoing it far outweigh the benefits, and particularly given the timing of this post–in the fall “off-season” for college and the post-season for club–there should be no major impetus to overdo it to strive for incremental benefit. Just doing the lift properly and consistently will lead to great results without much loading at all.

For information on proper squat technique (in far more depth that I’m going into here), check out T-Nation, and keep an eye out for Dave Tate, Mike Robertson, and Eric Cressey. Crossfit is also hugely keen on the squat (including the overhead squat). They have a wealth of videos that can enhance your understanding.

***This clip*** is THE clip to see if you’re new to squatting, want to teach other people to squat, want to squat, or do squats. It gets at the most basic components of squatting in the quickest way I’ve seen (I wish I had known this last year when I was teaching guys to lift!) Note the stance at the beginning.

Another squat option for the particularly risk-averse is the front squat–note that this will work your hips differently than a back squat, emphasizing the quads more (which astute readers will note in a comment I made last week, is not a muscle group that I believe needs training emphasis in most of the population).

Mark Rippetoe puts bad form more eloquently than I ever could:

The common form problems in the squat upset this balanced lever arm relationship and result in the biomechanical inefficiencies that typify bad form. If the knees cave in toward the middle, the quads are being asked to do the job of the adductors, and, as in our earlier example of the hamstrings in the deadlift, they are strong enough to do it, even though it leaves the adductors untrained and ultimately weakens maximal squat capacity. The femur and the tibia, which normally operate vertically parallel as the knee flexes and extends, deviate inward (toward the midline) at the knee, squishing the lateral meniscus in the knee joint due to the uneven load. The bones move wrong, the muscles move them that way, and the muscles get trained wrong as a result.

Don’t train the muscles wrong. Practice GOOD FORM! Get a spotter to observe you. Use a mirror for cursory checking (but realize that it’s not the end-all be-all, as your view is limited). GET A CAMERA and RECORD YOURSELF lifting. Number one way to see how good or silly you look. Most of you will disregard this advice and just go dick around in the gym (or perhaps worse–not go to the gym at all). At the very least, get somebody to check you out for the first few times you do it until your body gets a good sense of how it works.

Squatting IS a natural movement to some extent, so you can teach yourself–however, most of us lack the range of motion in the hips to truly pull it off. Do the Samson stretch. Practice doing overhead squats with a broomstick or similarly light-weighted item. Make your hips work through a full range of motion (Get Your Butt in Gear). Squat.

You get better at squatting by squatting, but only well-intentioned squatting. When I caution against going too heavy too soon it is for this reason–you need to be able to get a full, comfortable range of motion (and know its limits) before you progress to developing strength through that range of motion. This means, ideally, a fair bit of time devoted to squat technique before you even get under the bar. If you want to get under early, that’s your perogative, but use light weight and still focus on form (if you can’t get your butt down to parallel without arching your back, go as far down as you can without compromising it–and consider box squats). It’s important to progress slowly if you want to avoid injury trouble and weakness-inducing imbalance down the road.

As you get comfortable with your range of motion (and you WILL notice an improvement in your fitness just from this improvement alone without any additional weight), THEN you can start adding resistance (weight) and make yourself into an Athlete.

To be sure, you can get away with just about anything for training in the short term. But long term, you need to plan. Set some goals. This practice will help ensure continued progress (and an idea of what might be stalling your it if you hit a wall).

Female readers should note that this advice applies every bit as much if not more so to you. The lack of strength training in women’s ultimate is rather astounding to me. Getting “huge” is not a consequence of lifting–it’s a consequence of diet and bodybuilding. If you know me, 5’8″, 135lbs on a good day, you’d know that all my training has done very little to jack me up–I’ve maybe seen a net gain of a few pounds at most. It has, however, helped me to lean out, and left me heck of a lot stronger and more athletic than I would have been without stepping inside of a gym.

There is no good reason not to squat. None. Absolutely none at all. Do you have reservations? Email me or leave a comment and I’ll do my best to allay them. Short of being recently (a couple months) off of ACL surgery there’s very little that should keep you from this, the most fundamental of motions.

UPDATE: Deadlifting is the squat’s complement; I’ve written about it here and here.

Related posts:

1. Lifting: More on Deadlifting
2. Strength Training For Ultimate – General Considerations
3. Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Ankle Strengthening
4. My Favorite Exercises
5. Treating Chronic Knee Issues: An E-Mail Case Study (Part 1)