Squat Mistakes - Look Out for These Signs!

The squat is virtually a necessary exercise if you want to get added muscle, increased leanness, or improved results from your gym routine. Over time, adding squats to your exercise routine will help increase your overall strength and size since the exercise trains almost all of the body's muscles and aids in significant muscular growth.

Some fitness trainers use the squat exercise to evaluate a person's strength and flexibility before developing a training program for them.

Squats may be done with or without weights. However, using weights or not, some common mistakes must be avoided. Continue reading to learn more about what mistakes to avoid....

How Does Squatting Benefit Us?

Squats are a fantastic exercise to add to your regular fitness routine. They provide a large number of benefits that work together to strengthen your muscles. Performing weighted barbell squats can improve lower body strength. Even performing weightless jump squats will strengthen your back muscles while enhancing overall stamina and aerobic fitness.

Performing squats can also help you:

Improve your posture.
Boost core stability.
Increase the size and strength of your hamstrings, quadriceps, and glutes.
Lessen your chance of incurring knee and ankle injuries.
Improve motion in the tendons, bones, and muscles that surround the leg.

Mistakes When Doing Squats

There’s a lot of room for mistakes with any complicated exercise, and the squat is no exception. Here are the top five (5) squatting errors squatters make.

Not Initiating the Movement from the Hip

Squats are commonly done incorrectly by beginning from the knee rather than the hip. This raises the risk of a knee injury while exerting the most pressure on the wrong muscles.

Lifting Your Heels

Men frequently elevate their heels as they squat downward. But this puts more strain on your knees, moves the weight forward, and makes things more difficult. To correct for this, push through your heels instead. To compel yourself to utilize your heels when squatting, curl your toes upward as a temporary cure.

Losing Tension

Any squat can be correctly executed by keeping tension throughout the whole lift. However, if you're not careful, it's possible to lose tension near the bottom of the squat. Losing tension at the bottom of the squat can occur for two reasons: a) either you descended too rapidly by merely rushing to drop down, or b) you squatted too deeply. Deep squats may raise the risk of knee and lumbar spine injuries, according to some research. Avoiding deep flexion has been recommended to limit the size of knee-joint stresses.

Never Do a Partial Squat

If you don't go all the way down when doing your squats, you won't get the full benefits that squatting provides. Moreover, you increase your risk of injury. When performing squats, make sure that you stand straight with the feet hip-width apart. Next, tighten your stomach muscles and lower down as if sitting in an invisible chair. Without leaning your upper body more than a few inches forward, lower yourself as much as you can. However, avoid bending your knees more than 90 degrees if you have knee problems, and keep your thighs parallel to the ground.

Leaning before Hip Hinging

Leaning forward at the beginning of your squat prevents you from properly hinging from the hip. Leaning forward too quickly places too much pressure on your lower back. For most of us, this is not a good thing. Therefore, aim to save your back, or the discomfort experienced from incorrectly squatting will become more pronounced and unpleasant as time goes on.

The Takeaway!

Implement some or all of the techniques mentioned above if you’re experiencing lower back or hip pain while you squat. Be sure to use proper form, including appropriate footwear. If additional comfort is desired, consider using a Squat Towel.

The Squat Towel provides increased cushion and padding to the barbell in an effort to reduce back or neck pain experienced while squatting. The Squat Towel is convenient, easy-to-wash, and easy-to-use, enabling you to focus more on your form and not on pain. Check it out at www.TheSquatTowel.com.

References:

https://www.physio-network.com/blog/is-it-safe-to-squat-deep-what-does-the-evidence-say/

https://aclstrong.com/3-mistakes-to-watch-out-for-when-doing-squats-for-injury-prevention/

https://healthyfity.com/the-10-most-common-mistakes-people-make-when-doing-squats/