You might think that squatting is beyond your current ability level, but if you have ever picked something up off the ground, sat in a chair, or straddled a toilet seat, then you’ve performed a squat! When you load that basic squat with weight, though, this improves your performance, increases your muscle mass, burns your fat, and helps to balance your posture, because the demanding nature of squatting triggers a release of hormones in your body, which supports the growth of cells. If you ever want to be able to achieve tough athletic endeavours like sprinting, jumping, landing, and change of direction, you need to target specific muscles in your legs and squatting does exactly that.
What squats do specifically is improve your ability to apply a lot of force in a minimum amount of time, which is important whether you want to improve your athletic ability, or just your every day activities. You also gain a huge amount of strength to tap into, which is vital for almost everything you do. Squats boost your strength levels very quickly, because they force a lot of big muscles to work together to perform the movement.
Unsurprisingly, this also targets the tone and size of your leg muscles, but squats are truly a full-body exercise, which means that you burn a lot of calories when you perform them. For example, placing a loaded barbell on your back makes your upper back muscles hold the weight and help keep the body upright throughout the set, your core gets fired up to prevent the body from tipping over and your lower body takes care of the movement. Therefore, weight loss can seriously get a boost with squatting, simply because hundreds of muscles are pitching in to get the job done.