JJ Virgin shows how to squat safely after 50 by hinging your hips back, keeping your chest up, and tracking your knees over your toes. Start with bodyweight over a chair for 10 to 15 reps before adding any weight. Proper form comes first.
How do you do a safe squat when you're 50+? And here's the reality. If you had to pick one exercise to do and to master, it would be the squat because this is something that you do in everyday life all the time, like coming up and down off a chair or a toilet or out of a car. So if you learn how to do this safely in the gym, then you'll be able to do it safely in real life. All right, here's what you're gonna do. First off, You want your feet about shoulder width or slightly wider apart. And if you want to, you can turn them out a little bit. The most important thing here is that you are not bending forward. You're actually sitting back. Now, I like to do this to start over a chair. That way, if you keep going, you stop yourself. And when you're doing this, you're going to have your hands on your thighs, and I'll show you a little trick as to why. So when you're doing this, the first thing I want you to do is think of hinging back and reaching back with your bum. So you're hinging back that way. Your knees are following your toes, but they're staying behind your toes. Now, along with your feet, the other thing I want you to think of is start to focus up on a spot above you so that you keep your chest up. You pull your belly button to your spine. And for your feet, you're thinking about connecting your big toe, your little toe, and your heel and driving into your heels as you're sitting back. Now, as you're doing this, You should be able to come to a point where your elbows would rest on your knees. See how I'm keeping my chest up? That shows that you're far enough down. And then ideally, reach your arms up. So that is the right way to do a squat. And to start with, I don't want you to even use any weight. All I would have you do is load over a chair and stand up, load over a chair and stand up, and do 10 of those. Okay, and then get to a point where you can do 15. Once you can do that, then you can start looking at weight. But the most important thing, and the thing that will always be the limiter, is your form. The form always is the thing that you focus on first. Save this video for leg day.
