How to squat

Squatting is one of a small handful of things a body should be able to do for as long as it’s around: sit down to the floor and stand back up, under load if life asks for it. This is how we teach it at the gym — not as a set of rigid rules, but as a few principles you can build on.

Why squat at all

Your knees bend and straighten. Your hips do the same, and they swivel, swing and rotate on top of it. Together those two joints drive nearly every bit of human movement, from climbing a stair to getting off the floor. The body runs a strict use-it-or-lose-it policy: ask the muscles around those joints to work through their full range and they stay strong and mobile; stop asking, and the range quietly shrinks. A squat is the most direct way to keep asking. (We make the longer case for this in why your knees and hips need to move.)

Start with one leg

Here’s the part that surprises people: we treat single-leg work as the main event, not an accessory to the barbell squat.

There are good reasons. You get more depth on one leg. Your hips rotate more freely and through a greater range. It exposes and evens out side-to-side differences that a two-legged squat hides for years, because the strong side just quietly drags the weak one along. And single-leg squatting puts far less shear load through the spine.

The usual objection is that you can’t load one leg the way you can load two. True, but less true than people think — someone who squats 100 kg on two legs can usually handle 55 to 60 kg per leg, and more on a staggered stance. And the whole “more weight equals more strength” chase has steep diminishing returns anyway. Between stagger stances, split squats, deficits, lateral squats, skater squats, Cook squats, pistols and step-downs, you can train the knee, hip and ankle across a huge range of positions that a single barbell squat never touches.

We’ve written the full step-by-step progression — from box step-ups all the way to skater and Cook squats — in the single-leg squats guide. Start there for the how-to.

Keep the two-leg squat too

None of this means abandon the bilateral squat. Being dogmatic in either direction is the mistake. Goblet squats, t-bell squats, barbell squats, our own ladder squat — they all belong, especially for straightforward loading and for jump squats. A good week has a few single-leg variations and some two-legged work, usually paired with deadlifts. The goal isn’t single versus double. It’s doing both well and keeping variety in the mix.

How deep — and the myth about knees

Deep squats do not wreck your knees. The horror stories — “my husband did deep squats and shredded his meniscus” — are almost always about too much load, too soon, done too poorly. Not the depth itself. There’s little to no evidence that squatting deep harms a healthy knee when it’s done with control.

The lever you actually have is implementation. By adjusting the joint angle, how much support you use, how much hip you bring into it, where your ankle sits, and how far you descend, almost anyone can be coached to squat productively — knee replacement histories and nervous doctors notwithstanding. Depth is won over months, not days or weeks. Go as low as your joints are genuinely comfortable, and add range patiently from there.

The cues that matter

These hold whether you’re on one leg or two:

• Even pressure across the whole foot, heel down. Your weight shouldn’t lurch onto the toes or shift suddenly.
• Hips and knees move in sync. Picture a race between them — they start together, track each other, and finish together. Hips are the boss of the knees.
• Control the descent. No dropping, no jarring. You own the weight the whole way down and back up.
• Pick a spot and stare it down, especially on one leg — balance follows the eyes.
• Use assistance to earn a range before you remove it — a hand on a wall, a rail, a window grill, a pair of rings. There’s no shame in it; it’s how you build the position.

And one mindset note: exercises don’t have feelings. You don’t have to like a given squat variation. You just have to do it well enough, often enough, to get strong at it — and you’ll usually come to enjoy the ones you get good at.

Loading and progressing

Once bodyweight gets easy, reps alone stop making you stronger — you need load or a harder variation. Load can come from a goblet hold, a t-bell, a barbell, the ladder squat, a weight vest, or just something heavy held against your chest. Progress by nudging one dial at a time: a little more depth, a little more load, or a slightly harder variation. Over months, not sessions.

Squat safely

Don’t ego-lift and don’t overreach — the two habits behind nearly every avoidable squat injury. If you’re loading heavy, train with a spotter or with safeties set so you can dump the bar and step out cleanly. And treat a pinch or a sharp pain in a joint as information, not something to grind through. Back off, adjust, and live to train the next day.

You don’t need a barbell or a squat rack to squat well. You need a pattern you can genuinely own, a way to load it, and the patience to build depth and strength over months. Do that, and standing up off the floor at eighty stops being something you have to worry about.

The progressions and loads here are general. In coaching we scale them to you — your ankles, your hips, your history.

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