10 Cast-Iron Reasons Why You Should Squat

• Total body workout

Squatting is a 'multi-joint' exercise - meaning that when you squat, you are involving many muscles, especially in the lower part of the body, in unison to build real-world strength. As you are squatting with free-weights, you are also building stability, with any potential imbalances between your left and right sides being revealed, allowing you to identify, correct, and strengthen any weakness.

• Core strength improvement

When you squat, you are loading from top to bottom using a loaded barbell, so your core has to work overtime for you to keep your posture and balance the weight correctly. Heavy compound exercises such as squats are a must for strengthening your core, as they call upon all the muscles in your mid-section into action, working them hard

• Boost hormone release

Total body exercises such as squats are a great way for muscle-building hormones such as testosterone to be released. The heavier and more challenging the weight, the more anabolic hormonal benefit you will reap and this will help you build that all important muscle almost everywhere in your body.

• Enhanced flexibility

As we've already said, squatting is a multi-muscle, multi-joint exercise, and requires a full range of motion to be done correctly. Squatting, especially deep-squats allow for increased mobility, and are beneficial particularly for achieving flexible ankles, hip flexors and knees.

• Injury reduction

There is nothing more frustrating than being injured while wanting to participate in exercise or sport. Squats have the power to boost the muscles around key areas that are used in many athletic activities, namely the muscles around your knees and hips, as well as glutes, hamstrings and quads.

• Increased efficiency

Total body exercises such as squats do exactly that - exercise the whole body. Many people don't realise that squatting will eliminate the need for you to hop from machine to machine doing isolation routines to exercise a particular muscle or muscle group. This allows you more time to do correct and beneficial exercise that your body really needs to stay strong and healthy.

• Tones the body

Lifting heavy weights means building more muscle. And with squats, you can lift really heavy weights. The more weight you lift typically means the more muscle you build. The more muscle your body has, the more calories it burns to feed that muscle, so if you eat right, the more calories you muscles will consume and less will be stored as fat.

• Improved athletic ability

Building strength around your hip area allows you to not only to produce more power in athletic activities such as jumping and running, but also importantly to absorb it as well. This of course means less injuries from the rigours of sports.

• Grow your confidence

Engaging in an exercise routine that includes squats regularly helps you increase your body strength, enhances the look of your body, reduces the time it takes for you to look and feel strong and healthy, and helps you overcome and reduce the chance of injury. How can you not feel anything but confident?

• Lift your butt

Yes! Doing squats will work the glutes, so getting that all important shaped booty is down to using the humble squat!




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