Squat!

I have made no secret of the fact that squats are my favorite exercise.  However, I may have not been as obvious about WHY they are my favorite.

 

The very first reason they are my favorite is that I want to live an independent life all the way to the end.  As long as I can get up and down off the toilet by myself, I won’t necessarily have to go to assisted living or nursing home care (except, of course, if my tiny mind loses touch with reality, but that’s another problem).  In other words, I do squats to avoid a boring and sad existence in a small room.

 

A more cheerful reason to do squats is that squats work pretty much everything in our bodies.  The more muscles that work during an exercise, the more the exercise impacts our metabolism, burns calories, recruits stabilizers, improves our strength, and prepares us for the challenges of the world outside the gym.

 

Speaking of those challenges outside the gym, squats are particularly important as we get older.  By the time we get to 70, nearly all of us will have some bone loss (a.k.a. osteoporosis).  We can minimize that bone loss by doing weight-bearing activity (like squats!), but it will still happen.  With bone loss, we have to be careful about flexing our spines to avoid fractures.  In practical terms, this means that when we need to pick up things like packages or dogs or small children from the floor, we need to use our knees to get low rather than our backs.  Squatting regularly helps us do that.

 

Squats can be modified to suit nearly everyone.  People with troublesome knees may prefer to do squats with a stability ball against a wall or with the support of a TRX.  People with bionic/replacement knees will need to ensure that they don’t go too deep into the squat, as do folks with hip replacements.  Obviously, if a doctor or physical therapist tells us not to do them or if we experience the harmful kind of pain when we try to do them, we should skip them.  Otherwise, we should go for it.

 

Go play.