Everyone Should Squat: Why Daily Squats Make You Feel Younger & More Athletic

this video is proudly sponsored by squarespace the squat is a movement that doesn't get the love that it definitely deserves people do tons of push-ups and pull-ups but the squat which is kind of like the leg equivalent of a push-up pull-up doesn't get anywhere near the same attention and that's a massive shame because the squat is actually the one that i think people need the most out of these exercises people love it in the gym if they compile loads of weight on their back apparently they don't think it has the same value when performed with only body weight this is a huge shame because the body weight squat on its own can address so many different issues with mobility with pain with discomfort and it can improve your athletic performance this is something that we should be doing every single day and that's something that more and more coaches are now recommending of course the likes of ido portal and i highly agree with it this one movement can reduce pain it can improve mobility it can reduce your chances of injury it can make you faster help you jump higher make you more athletic can make you feel more youthful and more invigorated now the idea of doing anything every single day might be setting off alarm bells and rightly so often these are used as kind of hacks and cheats to try and brute force your way into a certain result you know i did 100 push-ups every single day it's a great clickable thumbnail and so was this to be fair but i'm not talking about doing hundreds of squats every single day i'm simply talking about getting into a squat position a resting squat sometimes it's called a primal squat or a deep squat every single day and that's something that i safely can recommend once you've built up to the ability to do it and as long as you don't have any issues that prevent you from doing it healthily because this is something that we've evolved to be able to do the squatting position is how we would rest in the absence of a chair it's how we defecate it's how women would give birth in some cases and so it's a position that we're supposed to be able to be in this is what we've got to look at when we're looking at our performance the way we feel it's not just what movements can we do it's what basic movements are missing from our routines that we would have gotten and that our body clearly needs so if you're not already a movement practitioner if you're not someone who does this regularly then you might find that you struggle to even get into a deep squat position and this is a good example of why we need it so much so if you try and get down into a resting squat like this and then you struggle you might find that one of several things is happening either you find yourself feeling like you're going to tip backwards that's slightly due to an issue with your ankle mobility you're struggling with dorsiflexion therefore your center of gravity needs to be more forwards you end up rolling backwards it might be an issue with knee pain or knee mobility because if you look your knees are bent all the way might be an issue with your spine because this puts a stretch on the bottom of the spine in particular which is something so many of us could do with or you might find that your toes want to splay outwards that your knees start caving in or your feet start caving in this is due to hip mobility issues we need a little bit of internal rotation or to keep the toes pointing fairly forwards when we stand up we're using external rotation to drive ourselves upwards and keep the knees and the ankles all nicely in line you might finally get a little bit of butt wink this can happen if your hip sockets are too deep which means that when your femur moves upwards like that it actually causes your pelvis to tuck underneath it's like you're tucking up your tailbone the solution to this is to move your legs slightly out more for a lot of people this can address that issue however then you're going to need a little bit more hip mobility of course there's no one perfect way to squat and each person is going to look slightly different you might find you need to lean more forwards or you might need to find that you can easily stay more upright however should be rounding the back ideally you want to keep the spine straight still we're just going to lean forwards a little bit your feet should be pointing roughly forwards but it doesn't have to be exact you don't want them splayed out like this unless you're gonna do some kind of sumo squat or plie but if you just twist them out slightly that's fine of course you got into this mess because you never have to squat in your daily life you spend so long sitting in that position with your spine supported probably with an unnatural curvature glute's deactivated all this means that you now struggle to get into a basic squat position but more than that it means you're stiff and awkward as you move around throughout the day and squatting to some extent is a simple fact of life whether you're getting up out of the couch if you find that difficult then working on your squat could help a lot if you're squatting a bit to pick something up you're more likely to round your spine if you have a weaker core which means you're more likely to injure yourself if you're running if you're jumping you're less likely to keep your knees and your ankles aligned especially when you're jumping when getting into that counter movement can be useful depending on the activity the easier it is for you to drop down the more you can spring right back up and jump super high this is going to unlock more athletic performance therefore and liam ellis the parkour guy that i've trained with a couple of times told me how important a deep squat is for parkour because it allows you to land really nice and easily the ability to get into a really deep squat means it's going to be easier for you to get into a more shallow squat and to control that movement downwards in short after practicing this for a while on a daily basis you'll wake up in the morning with more energy more vigor feeling more youthful more ready to take on the day and now let's take a moment to talk about today's sponsor squarespace if you want to build a website squarespace is your best bet this is a powerful tool that creates sites that look modern attractive and professional it's easy to use with no coding required turn your passion into a business with a number of professional features such as gated members only content for easy monetization with member management email communications and audience insights there's an integrated commenting system with support for threaded comments replies and likes blogging tools of course for publishing content categorizing and scheduling posts and more plus social media integration to display posts from your social profiles on your site or push social media content automatically there are powerful ecommerce capabilities for selling goods too additional third-party extensions provide inventory management marketing streamline to bookkeeping sales tax reconciliation and filing and logistics for global shipping and when you're ready to launch bioneer viewers can get 10 off the purchase of their first website or domain by going to squarespace.com forward slash bioneer today and now on with the show and that's the really good news this is really easy to fix and solve all you need to do to get better mobility in all these areas is to practice the resting squat but of course we need to do this correctly if you're squatting incorrectly then you're only going to exacerbate these issues and make them worse and of course if you're someone who even struggles to get into this position then we need to use progressions to work up to it gently in a safe and healthy manner so one of the easiest ways to start out learning to squat if you struggle to do it at the moment is to use some kind of counterbalance something to hold on to and this can help you control the movement down and back up at the same time it's going to prevent you from tipping backwards and you can even apply a little bit of pressure to ease into that ankle mobility so just hold on to railing someone's hand a chair whatever you've got lying around and then just squat down holding on and then you can practice keeping your core up helping yourself more or less and that's a really great way to work on that mobility gently if you could only go down this far before your knee starts to hurt then just go down that far we don't want to work through pain at any point you should be able to feel the difference between discomfort from stretching and actual pain and of course the very best way to do this safely and without exacerbating any existing injuries is to speak to someone in person who can look at you who can look at your unique biomechanics and your medical history and help you to do this in a safe way however for those that don't have any problems this is a nice easy way to get yourself back into that very natural movement pattern another way you can make it slightly easier if you do have tight calves and struggle with ankle mobility is to prop your heels up on something slightly like a squat block a weight plate in the gym or even just a stick or rock that you find even just a slight incline if you're out and about that make it easier to get into that position without a lot of dorsiflexion then you want to reduce the amount of help you're getting by lowering and lowering the amount of rays you have on the heels and eventually you want to work all the way up to doing it with barefoot shoes because this is another reason that we have these issues in the first place because we walk around with shoes that have big heels on we never need that kind of range of motion everything tightens up and if you're struggling with the squat and you want a real practical functional way to practice it then another great easier progression is just sitting down and standing up just find yourself a bench or something like that sit down stand up this is a great way to limit mobility to something you're comfortable with but at the same time you're working strength in many of the same areas boom now i'm in this place of course you can also improve your squat mobility and strength by isolating specific areas that are causing you trouble a great example would be to work on the glute medius by doing hip abduction alternatively you might want to open up the ankles a little bit more by stretching the calves you can do it through elephant walks i made a whole video on ankle mobility and stability really recently which nobody watched so go and check that one out if you want to learn a bit more about how to do that if you find it okay getting in this position but you feel you could use a little bit more hip mobility then a great option is to use the press squat you get down like this put your hands together and then use your elbows to drive your knees apart slightly it's really hard to overstate just how valuable practicing and resting squat really is apparently if you start training with the movement guru eda portal one of the first things he'll get you to do is practice squatting for 30 minutes a day a great benchmark used by a lot of coaches is to see if you can comfortably squat for 10 minutes in the go if you get to this point then you'll find it opens up so much more freedom of movement and power and confidence it's game changing in terms of the way you feel and the way you performed once you've got that range of motion that movement passing you're happy with it and you're not feeling any pain now you can start repping out high repetition bodyweight squats and these are fantastic for building up your legs building power explosiveness and working on that mobility keeping it there at the same time so you might think that if you can squat a whole load at the gym then there's no point doing high repetition bodyweight squats as you'll know if you've watched this channel for any length of time i highly recommend lower weight higher rep for a range of specific benefits for one you've got strength endurance being able to lift something really heavy once is not as useful as being able to lift something quite heavy a lot of times the thing is you don't actually need really heavy weight to build strength if you go to failure then you'll fatigue the slow twitch muscle fibers which will force the faster twitch muscle fibers to kick in again we need continual time under tension for this to work you don't build as much strength as you would with a heavy barbell of course but you could build a lot of strength and at the same time you'll be getting all of that strength endurance which is so useful when you're using your legs in a real world scenario and of course as you're wrapping these out you're also getting all of those mobility benefits the core strength and just cementing those newer pathways so you can drop down more powerfully and with more stability and because using very high repetitions particularly with a high continuous time and attention can cause blood to pull in the muscles this is also great for vascularization it can increase blood vessels and blood supply to the muscle and then there's studies that show a correlation between this and an increased satellite cell count and myonuclei count these are really important for protein synthesis muscle growth and they're particularly useful because they stick around even when your muscle atrophies the obvious example that comes to mind is prisoner training prisoners famously use only basic bodyweight exercises to build massive physiques lots of power and a great example of a prisoner who did this was mike tyson who reportedly used lots of bodyweight squats he would gamify this by using cards and picking them off the ground and he built massive legs this way and when he returned to fighting this gave him more power to drive through with his punches if you want the benefits of the high repetition squats but you don't want the stress that this can place on the knees in the back if you're not ready for it yet then you can elevate the heels and this will give you that great deep squat that you can use for high repetitions and with minimal risk of pain or problems another really good variation is the hindu squat here you're on the balls of your feet and you're squatting down allowing your knees to go past your toes this is a fantastic exercise again because this is one of the ways that we squat in real life you go down to play with your kids you'll probably be up on your toes just can't hold this position for as long you also run off of your toes and sprint and jump so if you want to develop power for sports and athleticism then really you need to be able to perform from this position as well the squat takes this even further you lean back in order to create a longer lever arm with your body and then perform the squat on your toes like that this is really good for strengthening the knees but you shouldn't do this if you have any current knee issues you have to work up to this one the pistol squat of course puts all your weight on one side and challenges you to balance through the movement really test your mobility because if you have any issues here you're going to fall backwards and it's a great exercise as well i won't go into huge depth right now talking about all the different variations there after the squat because a lot of these i'll make videos on in future i'll definitely be covering the hindu squat i'll probably cover the pistol squat let me know if you guys would like to see me cover any others in future as well i hope you found this video useful and interesting if you did then please leave a like and share around that's helped me out immensely let me know in the comments down below if you perform a squat every single day whether you do the resting squat whether you just do higher repetitions of bodyweight squats what works best for you if you like this kind of training and philosophy that looks at all around performance not just strength or aesthetics but mobility balance strength explosiveness even focus and brain power then you might enjoy my ebook and training program and full video course super functional training 2.0 the protein performance system there's a link to that in the description down below so over two hours of video tutorials along with a in-depth pdf either way thank you so much for watching this one guys i appreciate it massively and bye for now

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 1,212,625

Keywords: bodyweight squat, squat every day, daily squats, resting squat, primal squat, deep squat

Id: 0o2LX-quNZk

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022