Formosa Fitness

So here's the challenge: do 100 squats with your butt touching a basketball or medicine ball. Can you do it?

Many people have trouble squatting properly because they don't move from the hips. Sitting BACK into the hips takes the pressure off of the knee and allows for a deeper squat, giving better fitness results.

A thigh parallel squat is something that people talk about sometimes but usually don't do. It's too easy to fool yourself and that's where the ball comes in. Placing a ball (usually a basketball or medicine ball is used) under your butt and touching it on each rep insures that you are actually hitting parallel for most people. Those of you who are taller will naturally need to adjust the width of the feet in the squat to have the butt touch.

Many people claim that squats hurt their knees but not going low enough actually contributes to that problem. If you don't squat with the hip BELOW the knee (an actual parallel squat) the hamstrings don't fire, meaning the squat will only work the quads. You end up with a muscle imbalance from doing the exercise improperly. But actually, most everyone has deficient hamstring strength already due to sitting all day, then going to spinning class at the gym where they sit and think they're getting good exercise, and then going home to sit in front of the computer or the TV. All this sitting makes the hamstrings weak and tight. A full-range squat is a good way to start fixing that deficiency.

A simple program to get up to 100 might look something like this:
1. Work the squats 3 times a week, every other day
2. start with sets of ten, 20, etc., whatever pushes you a little but doesn't kill you. You want that last rep of each set to be hard but doable. stand in place over the ball as you rest for 10-20 seconds and then do the next set. Try to do 100 in as few sets as possible as you progress. In other words, you're trying to make 5 sets of 20 into four sets of 25, then three sets of 33, then two sets of 50, etc. That will get you to 100 in a fairly straight manner.
3. Place this exercise at the end of the workout for that day if this is new to you.
4. Use whatever ball or stool you have. You don't need a medicine ball to do it.

The fitness benefits of doing this three times a week is enormous if this is new to you. Properly done, this one exercise has the potential to solve a lot of problems that people have while burning fat and building muscle.

I don't usually like to do things over 100 reps, with a few possible exceptions. When I can do 100, I start looking for ways to make it harder.

Thoughts on how to progress the exercise:
1. Squeeze the quads or hamstrings while squatting. This gets you in touch with the muscle in a big way. For example, as you stand up really try to squeeze the quads. Squeezing the hams as you go down tends to be a lot harder for people to do but you can try it out.

2. Come up 3/4 of the way instead of standing up to full extension. This keeps the tension on the muscles constant. Very hard. A real quad builder.

3. Speed squats: try to do all 100 as fast as possible.

4. Vary the tempo. Do 10 really slow followed by a fast 20 then go back to 10, etc. This is a real leg killer.

5. Add light weights. This was the obvious one so I saved it for last. Even light weights can make this very hard.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

So there's the challenge. Can you do it?