Bodyweight Squat

Starting position:

Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and 30-degree toe rotation.

Straighten your torso and place your pelvis in a neutral position. Place your hands on your head just behind your ears. Keep your elbows out.

Exercise:

Begin to slowly flex your knee and hip joints without changing your back curvature as you breathe in and go down. Your knees are following the rotation of your toes. Your torso is upright without excessively bending over. Go all the way down until your hips are lower than your knees. Breathe out as you go back to the starting position in the same way. Repeat the exercise as required without changing your technique.

Note:

Maintain correct posture, your torso upright and your pelvis in a neutral position and eliminate lower-back lordosis.

Keep your knees pointing in the same direction as your toes all the way through and avoid oscillation while overcoming the resistance.

The front of the knees, head and torso should make an imaginary straight line with the toes that is perpendicular to the front. Your heels are kept on the floor at all times.

Avoid excessively bending over while going down.

Recommendation:

Perform the exercise in front of the mirror and watch yourself to make sure you are using the right technique.

To learn the technique, you may put a bench behind you and sit and rise from it. As your motion gets more fluent and your technique improves, you may lower your bench.

Stand with your feet shoulder-wide and place your hands next to your ears (locking the fingers behind your head will put unwanted pressure on the neck). Slowly lower the torso either so that your upper legs will be parallel to the floor (regular squat) or lower (deep squat).

Make sure your knees are not in front of your toes. This is not easy: a good training method is to squat facing the wall, with your toes touching it.

Squat is a basic exercise strengthening many muscle groups including quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, abdominal muscles and the muscles of lower back.

High-rep sets can be used very successfully for burning body fat (instead of popular crunches which are much more isolated and shorter movement that doesn’t burn specifically the abdominal fat any more than other exercises).