Results: Squats

Although considered a leg exercise, squats also offer benefits throughout the entire body, including deep within the core. Do you do squats on a regular basis?

What makes squats such a fantastic exercise? -Builds Muscle in Your Entire Body: Squats help to build your leg muscles (including your quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves), but they also create an anabolic environment, which promotes body-wide muscle building. -Functional Exercise Makes Real-Life Activities Easier: Squats are one of the best functional exercises out there, as humans have been squatting since the hunter-gatherer days. When you perform squats, you build muscle and help your muscles work more efficiently, as well as promote mobility and balance. -Maintain Mobility and Balance: Strong legs are crucial for staying mobile as you get older, and squats are phenomenal for increasing leg strength. They also work out your core, stabilizing muscles, which will help you to maintain balance, while also improving the communication between your brain and your muscle groups, which helps prevent falls. -Tone Your Backside, Abs and Entire Body: Few exercises work as many muscles as the squat, so it's an excellent multi-purpose activity useful for toning and tightening your behind, abs, and your legs. Furthermore, squats build your muscles, and these muscles participate in the regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism and insulin sensitivity, helping to protect you against obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. -Help with Waste Removal: Squats improve the pumping of body fluids, aiding in removal of waste and delivery of nutrition to all tissues, including organs and glands. They're also useful for improved movement of feces through your colon and more regular bowel movements. Did you know squatting had so many benefits?

Squats are also a wonderful exercise for women. Squats strengthen the pelvic floor, making for easier births and helping prevent pelvic floor disorder (such as incontinence, uterine prolapse, tailbone pain, deep hip pain, etc.). Most people aren't aware that a muscle has a correct length, which is neither too short or too long. When a muscle gets too short, it is no longer able to contract and generate force, which you need to keep things "closed" in the pelvis. All muscles have an opposing muscle group that prevents them from getting into this too-short position. The opposing muscle group to the pelvic floor is the gluteal (butt) muscles. Did you know this?

What's the Proper Way to Perform a Squat? Squats have long been criticized for being destructive to your knees, but research shows that when done properly, squats actually improve knee stability and strengthen connective tissue. 1. Warm up: Stand with your feet just over shoulder width apart. Keep your back in a neutral position, and keep your knees centered over your feet. 2. Slowly bend your knees, hips and ankles, lowering until you reach a 90-degree angle. 3. Return to starting position -- repeat 15-20 times, for 2-3 sets for beginners (do this two or three times a week) 4. Breathe in as you lower, breathe out as you return to starting position. Will you try doing squats?