DO NOT SQUAT!

Last year I started working for Helena Collins at her studio in Boston called Life in Synergy. Amazing studio with amazing owners! If you are ever in Boston, you should definitely drop by and if not visit www.lifeinsynergy.com since she also offers an excellent online training program.

Anyways, I learned a great deal from Helena and it all started during my first audition. For the first time in my fitness career I was told not to have clients do squats and if they absolutely must be done, they should only be done with feet hip width apart like chair pose in yoga. This instruction shocked me - I taught squats in just about every single class I instructed! As Helena educated me I began to understand the importance of eliminating this exercise from my repertoire, my classes, and my clients workouts. Hopefully, I can make you understand this too!

Structurally, doing squats will overdevelop the outer sweep of the thigh (vastus lateralis) causing an imbalance to the knees, and will also tighten your hip flexors putting additional strain on your spine. In order to keep it brief, I am going to focus on the tight hip flexors and lower back pain as the main reason NOT to do squats.

The problem with our society today is that we spend most of our time sitting down. Whether it is in a car, an airplane, on a bike, at meals, at our computer, or even in fetal position while we sleep - our hip flexors are in a contracted, shortened position. When in this position for an extended period of time, our hip flexors want to stay this length, making it harder for them to return to their correct length. Since the hip flexors attach to the lumbar vertabrae, when they keep getting shorter and tighter, they pull on the lower back. Now, think back to the squats. If we spend the majority of our time in this shortened position - should we take the hour or less we actually spend moving around and working out repetitively reinforcing this position?

Say goodbye to lower back pain by replacing the time you would waste doing squats to stretch your hip flexors instead! Try the kneeling hip flexor stretch in the image above - make sure you tilt your hips forward and for an added stretch reach your arms overhead...