20 Benefits of Squats You Can Enjoy Doing it Daily

The benefits of squats are unlimited. Whether you’re a bodybuilder or a homemaker, squats improve everyone’s real-life activities. Dr. Christopher Stepien, a sports therapist, says, ’50 squats a day can keep your doctor away.”

Whatever your age and gender is, all the squat variations are enough to make you a strong and fit person.

From getting rid of excess fat to increasing body balance, the humble squat is for everyone. Learn the 20 reasons why you should include squats in your daily workout routine.

Benefits of Squats for Men and Women

1. Strengthen Joints

If you’re doing squats properly, the pressure created due to squatting builds muscle strength. It also strengthens hip, knee, and ankle joints.

You may have heard that squats hurt knees. Actually, it does exactly the opposite. No other exercise can parallel its role in making your knee joints stronger. However, you shouldn’t bend your body forward while doing the workout.

2. Increase Quad Strength

Four major muscles make up your quad: rectus femoris, vastus intermedius, vastus lateralis, and vastus medialis. These muscles retain the stability of your knee. Squatting increases the strength of these muscles. Therefore, knees gain their lost strength.

3. Prevents Injuries

Generally, weak ligaments cause workout and athletic injuries. Additionally, stabilizer muscles and weak connective tissue can increase the chances of getting injured while in sports or doing exercise. Squats make these ligaments and tissues strong. As a result, you’re less likely to get injured.

4. Helps in Weight Loss

Did you know squats can burn as much fat as a five-mile run can? Actually, squats are more effective in burning fat. Unlike cardiovascular exercises, squats burn fat even when you’re not working out. Squats gift you with more muscles. Consequently, you begin to lose weight. It’s said that with every 10 pounds of muscle gain, a person loses 500 calories of fat.

5. Give Shape to Your Whole Body

Squats shed off excess fat. In fact, they’re more effective than many other exercises to lose belly fat. This means it will remove the love handles that were irritating you. From shoulders to your calf, this exercise tone up your entire body. If you’ve big butts, do this workout to tone it up.

6. Maintains Balance and Mobility

Aging takes away the strength from your legs. It affects your balance and mobility. Squats are essential to boost strength. They work out your stabilizing muscles. The communication between your muscle groups and brain improves. Ultimately, you start to get back the lost strength of your legs.

7. Eases Day to Day Activities

Many day to day activities compels us to sit in a squat position. For instance, you’ve to squat to pick up something from the floor. When you practice squat daily, sitting in a squat position to perform daily activities won’t be difficult for you. Finally, your body can move more efficiently in the real world.

8. Triggers More Production of Anabolic Hormones

Squats are a great exercise for the growth and repair of overall muscles. Research on the benefits of squats shows that it increases the production of anabolic hormones. Some of these anabolic hormones are testosterone and muscle growth hormones. These hormones synthesize proteins. As such, you get more muscles.

9. Improves Posture

Another great benefit of squat is it improves posture. When you do it correctly, your spinal erectors are strengthened. Your whole body comes in alignment. This improves your posture. A good posture prevents many bone and muscle-related issues.

10. Removes Cellulite

You may have that ugly-looking dimpled skin on your calf and butt known as ‘orange peel’. Various factors including poor blood circulation lead to the formation of cellulite. Squats ensure proper blood circulation. Your cellulite will soon start to disappear. If you do squats daily, getting rid of those puckered skin won’t be a far-fetched dream.

11. Eases Digestion

Regular squatting aids in a more regular bowel movement. It eliminates waste and toxins from your body easily. The result is you enjoy a healthy digestive system.

12. Increases Flexibility

Flexibility is important to prevent injuries. Therefore, gym trainers focus on including exercises that improve flexibility. Squats involve stretching and bending of the leg muscles. Your leg muscles become strong and flexibility increases.

13. Removes Bodily Waste

Squatting the right way helps to remove bodily waste. It ensures a proper supply of nutrients to all your glands and organs. It also regulates the feces movement through the colon. So, if you’re facing any urine-passing related issues, squats may help.

14. Ensures Better Libido

Almost 16% of men have lagging libidos during their lifetime. Squats are a must-do exercise for these guys. Not only it accelerates testosterone production but also enables blood to flow properly to the genitalia.

15. Low Impact Exercise

Squats never exert excess pressure on your joints, knees, and back. Therefore, they’re considered as a low impact aerobic exercise. People of almost any age can do it without any risk.

16. Enables You to Jump Higher

Athletes sometimes need to jump high. And, squats can help. A study was conducted in 2012 among 59 people. They got a 10-week training on three different variations of squats: partial squat, back squat, and front squat. The outcome? Deep full squats increase the jump height of the participants. Further research proved that squats boost the ability to develop force.

17. Boosts Confidence

Strength gaining improves your confidence. Squats exactly do that. It builds up strength. Furthermore, you start to lose weight. All these play a great role in boosting your confidence level.

18. Strengthen Heart and Lungs

You’ve to give the effort to do squats. The effort you give in turn increases the strength of cardiac muscles. Moreover, the use of weights to do squats aid in enhancing the capacity of your lungs.

19. No Equipment Involved

You don’t need any special equipment to do squats. Neither costly membership at gym centers nor any special workout clothing. All you need is just the basic knowledge of how to do squats the right way.

20. It’s Fun

Undoubtedly, squats are challenging. When you get bored following the same monotonous workout routine, bring some spice to it with this exercise. Variations of squats make it practicing even more fun.

Preventive Measures While Squatting

Squats can cause many injuries. Near about 75% of squat related injuries occur during starting and finishing of the exercise. However, you can prevent injuries by following certain self-care rules.

1. Never relax or slouch the back while squatting. Maintain a strong muscle tension throughout squatting. It will help to control the movements of the fluid.

2. Focus on lifts and maintain a good muscle tension to increase squat safety.

3. Engage and tighten your abdominals to give support to your lower back. Or, you can use a weight lifting belt to support the torso.

4. Make sure your feet are wider than the hip width. The toes should face the front.

5. Lower yourself as far as you can. However, do not lean your upper part more than a few inches while lowering.