Should squats be apart of your program?

Squats have been dubbed the king of all exercises. That’s mainly because of its extremely beneficial effects on the body, working multiple muscle groups, increasing overall strength, and spiking human growth hormone. That said, squatting may not be beneficial to everyone depending on their specific goals.

“Squats are used to build bigger muscles. But that being said, if my legs are too big to begin with, I need to balance my body and I need to work on heavy work on my upper body, more cutting on my lower body,” Ron Williams says.

The conventional wisdom about squats — that more is more — doesn’t really apply here. Like many veteran bodybuilders, Williams understands that if your ultimate goal is a well-balanced physique, it’s more complicated than packing on the mass and doing a time-tested workout, it’s about calculating the overall proportionality of your finished physique. If you’re an amateur bodybuilder looking to place a regional competition, that information should matter to you.

Squats work multiple muscle groups, but most of the focus is on the glutes and legs. For athletes who are already working out those muscles, say, lifting weights, the results of overdosing on squats could lead to an extremely bottom-heavy physique. If you incorporate a lot of squats into your routine, you have to be careful that you aren’t piling stress onto your lower body by doing workouts that could strain that area.

“Squats release your own natural human growth hormone,” Williams continues. “Which will actually cause your whole body to grow.”

So, there are obviously overwhelming benefits to choosing squats, which is probably why they’re one of the staples of the bodybuilding industry and a first-choice workout pick for even inexperienced newbies. But, you should always factor in all the variables in a workout situation, and the more you know, the better you can make those decisions for yourself. The key word here is aesthetics. When you’re making decisions about how to structure your workout, you should always be picturing your end-game goal physique, not mindlessly packing on the most reps and mass possible.

For someone looking to have a balanced physique without any body parts overpowering the others in terms of overall size and shape, then adding squats to your routine will be very dependent upon your genetics. That’s right, if you have the kind of genetics that make your legs responded dramatically to squats then the movement may not be the most ideal.

In the video, veteran bodybuilder Ron Williams goes in depth about why adding squats to your program can either be a major benefit or a considerable detriment to your overall goals of aesthetics and balance.

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