While squats are great exercises to have a bigger and firmer butt, you need to do the exercise right for you to achieve ideal results. To be on the safe side you need to avoid these five common mistakes:
Squatting Every Day
While fitness experts will tell you that consistency is the key to having a great body, you should avoid squatting every day. This is because doing this will result to soreness and you will lack energy and morale to exercise.
The best way of going about it is resting in between the squatting days in order to allow your muscles to heal and repair. For example, you can exercise two or three times a week and leave the other days for muscle recovery.
Not Going Low Enough
For you to engage your glutes and hamstrings, you should lower yourself all the way down until your thighbone is parallel to the floor. If you don’t lower yourself low enough, chances are that you won’t have the butt that you want.
If you are having problems in lowering yourself you should practice in front of a knee high box or step. For ideal results you should lower your butt until you are barely touching the box. Once you reach this position you should then push yourself back up.
Failing To Add Resistance
While air squats are ideal for beginners, you should not engage in the squats for more than six months. This is because you won’t be seeing any positive results. For you to record results you need to add resistance to your glutes for them to grow.
When using weights you should be careful and ensure that you don’t injure yourself. For ideal results you should start off with a small weight and then gradually add more as you continue exercising.
You should stick to 12 reps and for you to know that you are heading the right direction, the last two reps should feel as if they are too hard to complete, but not impossible.
Having Incorrect Knee and Foot Alignment
While this is a common mistake in beginners, there are some experienced people who make it. If you are having the problem you should make every effort to fix it and the easiest way of doing it is performing squats in front of a mirror.
The first thing that you should do is to ensure that your knees stay aligned with your thighs throughout the movement. As rule of thumb you should never let your knees cave or collapse inward. According to experts, the best way of preventing the knees from caving in is rotating the feet slightly outward.
Correct Way to Do a Basic Squat
Eating The Wrong Food
One of the main factors that affects healthy muscle growth is the food that you eat. This means that if you eat the wrong food, you will have unhealthy or no muscle growth.
For you to have a bigger butt when doing squats you should eat food with plenty of protein. Some of the best proteins that you should add to your diet are fish and eggs. For ideal results you should eat six times a day, three hours apart.
I tried watching myself in a full-length mirror while I was doing squats and I was making some of the mistakes you listed. I’m glad you pointed them out of I would have continued to make the same mistakes, over and over.
What a great idea! I’ve been having back pain after doing squats and I bet it’s because I’m doing something wrong. I’ll have to find a mirror and see if I’m doing them like the video.
It’s good to be reminded of proper form when doing different exercises. I myself have had to learn the correct way to do certain exercises, such as lunge steps. I didn’t realize the importance of not letting your knees go past your toes, which seems to be the same thing as the tip given here regarding squats (keep your knees aligned with your thighs).
The next time I attempt to do squats, I’ll keep this article in mind. The animated .gif and YouTube video really helps to see the actual movement. And that’s a good idea to perform it in front of a mirror to be sure I’m doing it correctly.
I’m so happy I found this post! Squats are one of my favorite exercises to do and it seems that along the way i had forgotten just how many parts of them were so important to the actual results. Seeing the gif really helped to show me exactly what I should be doing. Now I can get a mirror set up and match what i’m doing to what he gif is to ensure I am doing it correctly. Thank you!
Squatting for me is a hard task. I was told that it helps to tighten the muscles in the cervix and i want those as tight as possible so i indulged in it a while back. Now it seem i was not going low enough…will get back to it this very day though.
I’m glad I found this post! I’ve recently gotten back into working out, and I found that despite my lack of leg exercises, I felt that having no resistance was not doing it for me. I started carrying a dumbbell during my squats, and I’m glad to see I’m on the right track. I also don’t have a mirror right now, so it’s difficult to see if I’m doing it properly. But, I’m going make sure I’m doing it well! I don’t want to hurt myself.
I started doing squats about a year ago, and the first time I started they burned and worked my legs. I really saw a change in them. Now that I restarted them back up, I don’t feel that same burn did in the beginning. Last time I started with 40 and by the time I was done, I could barely walk the next day. This time I started with 60 and I feel fine. I’m gonna give this a try. Very helpful, hopefully. Thank you.
Wow. I have been doing squats incorrectly. I have been doing this exercise for months now and though it did improve my butt muscles pretty well, the result were bigger thighs.. apparently, the muscles in my thighs have grown as well. I have done this exercise for 100 times daily. So, perhaps I should revision my habits.
A good way to evaluate whether you’re doing an exercise properly is whether it hurts or not. If an exercise causes you physical pain besides from the “burn” feeling, you should stop doing it and research it a bit better.
I’m so happy you wrote this post! I remember doing squats for years and wondering why they didn’t hurt. I just tried again, and only did a few before I could feel the burn! I think for me it was mostly posture. Thank you!
Squats are such a great exercise to include in your regimen! One of my favorite exercises. I love that you also tipped on the importance of nutrition in addition to exercise. Having a protein-rich diet is so important if you want to see real results with strength training exercises
What do you think of the suggestion of going beyond parallel in the squat? I see a lot of trainers recommending “a** to the grass” as in touching your bum to the ground. I’m not sure which is better of the two. I’ve been going to parallel but wondering if I’d see more results going lower.
This is very important. This blog focuses on fitness, but I think everyone should squat with weights. Then this exercise can do miracles to your lower body. But ALWAYS make sure you’re doing them correctly – especially with weights
I am glad that I found this post because I have been doing squats every day back to back. I am glad that I do not have to. Squats really do hurt your thighs which I know means that they working. I do not need a bigger butt but I am trying to make it firmer.
I do squats every now and again, but whenever I do them my dad would say I’m doing them wrong. I tried to replicate his movements but I just could not wrap my head around it. These steps on what not to do helped me a lot. I can actually see what I’ve been doing wrong and now I know what a squat is suppose to look like. I think these are very important to read because anyone could suffer from injure if they do squats wrong. Great info!
After reading this article, I realized that I’ve been doing almost everything wrong. I was wondering why I wasn’t getting very good results. I used to do squats one a day and I would do almost 50 of them! That was probably really bad for my muscles but at least now I am more informed about what I should and should not do. I am awful about going down low enough but I will have to start working on that. I really liked how you gave an example and a video. Those two things were both super helpful when it came to correcting my posture while doing squats. Thank you for being so helpful!
I used to cheat really bad when squatting. I wouldn’t even come close to 90 degrees. Then one day, I decreased the amount of weight I was using and went down as low as I could go.
The exercise felt completely different and way more effective. I can’t stress enough how important utilizing the full range of motion is with this exercise.