Squatting A Whole New Perspective

I have been personal training for over 12 years and have been in gyms for over 18 years and have noticed a shift in the way we view exercises. One such exercise is the squat. When I first started working out with weights as a teenager,  a majority of people weren't gung ho on doing squats. The thinking at that time was that you only want to do squats to get bigger, stronger legs and the only people who really seemed to care about that were weightlifters, bodybuilders and athletes. Also, a lot of people didn't do them because there was this false pretense that squats were bad for your knees. Fast forward to the present, now squats are one of the most popular and utilized  functional training exercises that any personal trainer can have their clients do. A lot has to do with these two new viewpoints on squats. One, people in the fitness industry finally realized that "Hey, people squat all day in everyday life activites (i.e. to sit on the toilet, to sit in a chair  and to sit down in a car)"! Also, now fitness people are realizing that from our early predecesors (the hunter-gatherers that we started out as) there weren't any chairs so you were either standing, lying down or squatting. Now putting this all in perspective, you should squat because it is something that you do on a daily basis more than you know.  You don't have to do a ton of weights to get lean, toned legs, you just have to use a variety of different techniques (i.e. sets, rest periods, load and intensity) and different variations of squats to get the results that you want. Here are a few variations of squats.

BODYWEIGHT SQUAT                                                                     PISTOL SQUAT

                             





BARBELL OVERHEAD SQUAT                                                    BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUAT