Written on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 by Miroslav Nikolov
Weight loss exercises: Quest for right squat exercising
One of the best exercises for weight loss and one of the hardest – squat. Right squat exercising means better muscle training and injury insurance.
Squats are very disputed. How you should to do it, how much, when, what kind and so on. I will try to answer these questions by offer you some explanation about right exercising and different types of squat exercises. It is your choice which one you are going to use.
First it doesn’t matter if you are man or woman. You should do squat exercises if you want to increase your weight loss results or just break the stagnation.
1) Right squat exercising – how to do it?.
There are different types of squats, but the technique is the same no matter if you are using it for weight loss or not. You can choose to put your arms behind your neck, cross them in front of your body or extend them horizontal in front of your body.
You can choose to put a horizontal bar on your neck, you can do squats with dump-bells or using hack or smith machine.
Start position:
You are stand, the space between your feet is as much as your shoulders width, your arms position is what you decide to be. Also later here I will explain you about different feet’s position and space between them.
Start moving:
You are in start position and then slowly and under controll start to squat – do this by imagine you are sitting on a chair. Move your pelvis backward during squat moving.
Keep your back stand during.
Stop position:
It is good to stop when your legs are in parallel with the floor – this will help you keep pressure in your thigh muscles.
Very important:
Your chest has to be in line with your knees. You have to keep an eye if this is like that during all parts of the exercise. Do not bend too much. Do not be too stand, just imagine you are sitting on chair.
If you are training without extra weight the risk of injuries is not so big, but you should keep your right exercising if you want to achieve healthy and safety weight loss.
When you are in stop position - stand up. Here you can choose to do all parts of the exercise slowly – the rule is that you should squat slower than you stand up.
You can choose to do it fast – make it some kind of fast weight loss cardio training. You can choose also to jump after stand up position – it is all your choice.
2) Squat positions and exercise muscles participation.
- Feet positions during squat:
- When your feet space is as much as your shoulders width you pressure all parts of your quadriceps. The inner and outer parts are equally pressured.
- When your feet space during squat is less than your shoulders width then you pressure most of all your outer quadriceps muscles.
- When your feet space is much more than your shoulders width you pressure your inner leg muscles and butt. This squat exercise is known as duck squat.
- Feet finger positions during squat:
- When your finger direction is like V much of the pressure is taken by inner leg muscles.
- When it is like reverse V you pressure outer muscles.
You can combine different feet positions if you want better pressure for exact muscle parts – just experiment and do not forget to do squat exercising right.
- Body positions during squat:
- Your chest is behind the line of your knees. This position helps you to pressure your butt more than your quadriceps, but also it increases the chance of injuries, especially if you exercising squat with extra weight.
- Your chest is in front of the knee line. This position helps you to pressure quadricep muscles near your knees (bottom part of quadriceps) and your lower back. This position is dangerous too – you can harm your lower back or fall ahead, because it takes more weight.
It is good to experiment with body position during squat exercise using smith machine. It takes care of the balance and reduces the risk of injuries. Also helps you pressure muscles you can not with normal weights.
Hack machine or hack squat is good if you want to experiment with leg position or if you want to reduce the pressure of your back. You can also reduce the pressure on the butt or increase it, because this machine also takes care of balance and let you focus on right squat movement.
Squat exercise has many variants, but if you do normal squats without machine help, you should keep right moving during all parts of the exercise.
3) Squat exercise – how much, when, how often.
How often: If you do squats in your weight training then once a week is enough. Do not forgets that you pressure your legs also with cardio exercising.
When: Do squats as first leg exercise, because it is hard one. Also escape to do squats before back training, because these are big body muscle groups and the risk of over-training is higher.
How much: Four sets with 10 or 12 repeats for weight training.
15 to 25 repeats in 5 sets for cardio training.
If you do circle training then you can do squat exercise in 2 sets – 12 repeats for one of them and 20 for second one or reverse.
If your leg training is built only by squat exercise – do more sets of it or combine with machine squats.
This is small part of squat exercising. I hope this is going to be enough for you to choose your favorite one and learn how to exercising right. Now read the summary and after that you can share your thoughts about squats or just your favorite variant:)
Summary:
- exercising squat by keeping your chest in line with your knees;
- always control the weight if you put some;
- do not over-train;
- combine different squat exercises for better results;
- use hack and smith machines, especially if you have back problems;
- don’t forget about your nutrition;
Stumble it! 
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