How To Squat With Good Form

Hi, I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and today I want to show you a few quick tips for the squat. Now, a bodyweight squat basically looks like this. Simply sit down and stand up. Now, from the side, it looks like this. It's a great tool for toning your thighs, your butt, your hips. It's also a great way to build strength for athletic sports performance. But one of the things that can be tricky is actually squatting properly, especially if you haven't done much squatting. And so what you want to try and do is keep your knees from going in front of your toes when you squat. There's two different tools that I use with my clients to teach them how to keep their knees in proper correlation to their toes. Because if your knees go in front, you're going to put a lot of stress on your kneecaps. You can end up having pain when you do your squat. One tool that I use is a stability ball. Simply put the ball behind your back. You want it to be in the small of the low back. And this is where a lot of people make a mistake. They lean into the ball. Imagine that you have a quarter, and you're trying to keep that quarter between your low back and the ball with as little pressure from your body as possible. So it's just light featherweight on the ball. Just as little pressure as you need to put on that ball in order to slide it up and down the wall while keeping your knees behind your toes. So the ball is basically going to allow you to lean back a little bit without falling over. Because what you may find is when you try and your knees behind your toes, you fall back. Now, that's a great mistake to make because it means that you are doing a good job keeping your weight back. But you may need the ball back there the first few times you practice the squat to try and get it spot on. Now, once you're comfortable with that and once you graduate, rest into being able to do the body weight squat, good form. One of the other tests that I'll do, the people that I train, that's another good way to actually teach yourself how to squat properly is you do a wall squat. And the way this works is you go toe up to a wall that's in front of your body. Now, if you can perform a squat in this position, there's no way that your knees are going to go in front of your toes. So from this position right here, I simply slide down the wall trying to keep my weight behind my body. And then I stand up. This is a great way to give yourself a test and see how low you can go before you simply fall backwards or really drive your knees into the wall. So the squat's a great. I encourage you to use it in your weight loss program and also in your sports performance program. This is Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com thanks for watching.