Ahh yes the mobility of a child! How many adults do we know who can still suck on their toes?!?!?! As I have watched my girls grow throughout their first year of life, I have truly appreciated their ability to use proper form. Think about it, if all adults had the greatest % of body weight located above our shoulders, we would all squat with perfect form too. Babies don't have a choice to squat with bad form. If they bent over at the waist to pick something up, like many adults do, they would land right on top of that big noggin! Squatting is something we all do, everyday of our lives. Getting in and out of a car, sitting down to eat....and that's right...going to the bathroom. Let's see how we can improve our squats in order to improve our function throughout the day.
Real Squats vs. the Leg Press An article in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology compared muscular EMG activity between squats in a Smith Machine vs. regular squats on the ground vs. squats on balance discs. As the Squat became more unstable, the activity of the trunk stabilizers and postural muscles increased dramatically! (Anderson & Behm, 2005). In a time when our posture as a society has never been worse (due to the number of hours per day in seated positions) it is extremely important to choose exercises that help our posture…not hinder it. The only reason leg press machines were created was to make squatting easier!
To perform a squat correctly, we must keep our head and chest up, feet flat on the ground with our weight back on the heels, and lower our hips below the knees. That is a full range of motion, and that is a Real Squat! The reason healthy people don’t go down all the way is because they either cannot control it, suggesting lack of core stability, or they lack the range of motion, suggesting lack of normal flexibility, or likely because they cannot do as much weight when forced to go down all the way, at which point it becomes an ego thing. Most people would agree that in order to get better at golf, we must practice the entire swing. If we just practiced half of the swing, what kind of improvements could we really expect to see? So why then do we only train up to 90˚ of hip & knee flexion when performing squats? Most healthy people have around 125˚ of hip flexion available to them. Whatever range of motion you have available, try to use it, and choose a weight you can safely control getting in and out of that deep-squat position with.
Some individuals might have to go back to bodyweight squats, and work on earning that full range of motion. This is why squatting correctly is hard, and this is why many people take the easy way out and use leg machines. Next time you find yourself walking towards the leg press ask yourself “When in my life will I ever have to lie on my back, and push several hundred pounds off of me?” Also remember that when we sit down on a machine to do an exercise…we are telling our postural-stabilizers to go for a lunch break. It doesn’t work that way in real life. We rely on stabilizers to maintain postural control all the time throughout our day.
Will the leg press machine help grow muscle? Sure it will…in the prime movers (larger muscles)…but it does nothing to strengthen the muscles responsible for stabilizing our joints in all 3 Planes of Motion. So next time you want to do squats, don’t take gravity out of the equation, work on your mobility if you need it, or work on your core stability if you cannot control a full range of motion, and finally add in some instability at your level to challenge your stabilizers.
*** I am a huge fan of "Goblet Squats" (pictured below) because when we load up with a weight in front of us, we immediately activate our posterior postural muscles and shift our weight back on our heels, which instantly corrects form. It is also a self-limiting exercise in which you will not be able to overload your spine with a weight that you cannot control, because if you cannot hold it, you won't be able to do the exercise, so risk of injury is very low!!! Let us know how you do!
References: Anderson, K.; and Behm, D.G. (2005). Trunk muscle activity increases with unstable squat
movements. Can. J. Appl. Physiol. 30(1): 33-45. © 2005 Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology.
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