Niall's Weblog

The squat is an exercise I’ve really come to appreciate of late. The difficulty and importance of this movement cannot be underestimated. While the squat is in fact a very natural and innate movement – witness young children doing this effortlessly all the time. However, years of sitting in chairs and other things conspire to greatly reduce our ability to perform the squat.

Everyone can benefit from the squat – most obviously, it enables you to pick up and lift things without causing injury to the back. It helps flexibility and can be used as a tough conditioning exercise. Especially I think its important for people – like me – who spend most of their time sitting at a desk, to practice this movement.

The key to the squat is good form. Its easy to do a bad squat. Take the time to learn it properly, and to work on the correct technique. Personally, I had a lot of trouble getting low enough in my squat until my coach pushed me to a) keep my knees pressed outwards and b) hold my arms up overhead. Once I internalised those two things, my squat form improved a huge amount.

One common issue with the squat is rounding out of the lower back. I came across this great video tutorial for the squat, which describes the problem in detail and prescribes various fixes to get past that. Some highly valuable pointers in this one: