23 November 2014

Exercise for building muscle or losing weight - Squats

If you are serious about getting in shape and/or losing weight, one of the best exercises is squats.

Squats work practically every single muscle in your body.  And so more calories will be burned during and after exercise. A particular good one is Y-Squat.

The ways to do it are:

• Hold your hands over your head in a “Y” formation at all times.

• Keep your upper back and shoulders tensed throughout the exercise.

• Stand with your feet just greater than shoulder-width apart.

• Start the movement at the hip joint. Push your hips backward and “sit back into a chair”. Make your hips go back as far as possible.

• Squat as deep as possible, but keep your low back tensed in a neutral position.

• Don’t let your lower back become rounded.

• Push with your glutes, hamstrings, and quadriceps to return to the start position.

Regular squatting improved knee stability, strengthened connective tissue, and made connective tissue tighter and stronger than those who don’t squat. More recently, physiologists at the Mayo Clinic have found that squats actually place less stress on your knees than leg extensions.

In summary, the benefits of Squats include:

1.     Maintain Mobility and Flexibility. Squats build muscles and promote muscle growth across the rest of your body. Nearly 90% of athletic injuries involve the weaker stabilizer muscles, ligaments, and connective tissue and so squats can reduce the risk of injury. And researchers at Ball State University say that leg strength is critical for maintaining mobility as we age.

2.     Increase Functional Strength and Improve Balance. Squats force your body’s nerve networks to work your muscles more efficiently. Also, as we age, nerve endings and connective tissue degenerate naturally. Squats have been proven to improve the communication between your brain and your body’s major muscle groups, and improve muscle memory. This carries into your later years and goes a long way in preventing falls and broken hips.

3.   Increase Sprint Times. The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research published a study in 2002 stating that squatting allowed participants to increase their sprint times by a significant degree.

4.  Sports and Performance. Not only will it make you jump higher and sprint faster, it will make you stronger and more explosive no matter what your particular sport is

5.    Entire Body Workout. No other exercise that works more muscles than Squats.

6.    Increase Upper Body Strength. Growth Hormones and Testosterone are vital for muscle growth and squats stimulate your body to produce these more than any other exercise. Due to the large amounts of growth hormone and testosterone released by squatting, your upper body will grow larger and stronger than it would had you not regularly implemented squats into your workouts.

7.    Tone and Tighten Your Butt and Give You Great Abs.  
 

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