What is a Squat and why is it important?

The squat is predominantly a bilateral lower body compound exercise (uses multiple muscles), with particular emphasis placed on the quads, glute, and hamstring muscles. It Is an important and functional movement pattern that is demonstrated in everyday life.  For example, when we sit down and stand up from a chair, when we sit down to do a number 2 on the loo, or when we need to squat down to pick something off the ground.

Being a compound exercise, the squat is a great bang for your buck exercise when used to develop general athletic ability. This is particularly true when compare it to an isolation exercise such as the leg extension, which focuses on developing one muscle at a time instead of multiple. That’s not to say that isolation exercises are not important and don’t have their place in a program, because they absolutely do, it’s that they are less efficient developing both functional and athletic performance.

Another benefit of a squat is the ability to overload the body with the amount of weight we can use. For example, we can load a squat pattern with a lot more weight that we can load a leg extension machine.

Meaning that we utilise increased amounts muscle motor units (slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibres), we develop greater neural capability (faster messaging rates from brain to muscle and back) and we can achieve greater gains in functional hypertrophy (increases in muscle fibre arrangement: series and parallel). These benefits lead to greater increases in strength and force output and are important to athletic performance because strength underpins the qualities displayed in high power output activities such as jumping, sprinting, change of direction and decelerating

How do we perform a squat?

Going a little geekier into the movement itself, we can see that squat movement pattern can be performed using different movement strategies. The strategy employed is often dependent on either the technique (high bar squat/low bar squat), or the variation of the exercise used (back squat/front squat). See figure 1 for the examples of the different techniques and variations.

The strategy that we chose to use provides a greater emphasis on the musculature utilized to perform the action. The hip dominant strategy will present a greater hip angle and use the hip musculature to drive the movement (glutes, hamstring). Whereas the knee dominant strategy will present a greater knee angle when squatting and depend on the knee musculature (quads).

The different strategy can be seen in figure 1, with the blue line representing the hip dominant strategy and the green line representing a knee dominant strategy. See figure 2 for an example of the hip and knee angle during each squat variation.

Thank you for reading The Barbell Squat (part 1). In part 2, I will be discussing and explaining the technical aspects of the barbell squat is performed, so that you can go away and practice the movement both safely and effectively. If you enjoyed reading this post, please support me by liking and sharing.