Squat Myths and Misconceptions (Bad For Knees?)

The thing about myths is they’re often based on half-truths, and as the story is passed on from one person to the next, the details change slightly; once we’ve heard it often enough, we start to believe it as fact.

There are a lot of squat myths and misconceptions, but today we’ll look at 3, including whether or not squats cause hemorrhoids.

The first myth; squats are the only exercise you need for your lower body, and they’re often called a whole body exercise. They do work more than just your quads.

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One study that compared leg muscle growth after 10 weeks of squats between parallel squats and full-depth squats found that the knee extensor or quads, adductors and gluteus maximus muscles grew in both groups, but the hamstrings and rectus femoris, which is one of the quad muscles didn’t grow at all illustrating the need for more exercises to achieve complete leg development.

We can’t forget our calves either; they’re a leg muscle that, again, isn’t sufficiently worked with squats alone.

Adding Romanian deadlifts, hamstring curls, leg extensions, and calf raises goes a long way in rounding out our leg training.

What about squats being bad for our knees? This comes down to squat form and any pre-existing injuries to your knees. The main form issues are not squatting with your hips back far enough and your knees going too far forward, having your weight shift from midfoot to the balls of your feet, raising your heels off the ground.

This less stable position increases your risk of injury, particularly to your ACL or MCL ligaments. This happens when your knees cave inwards. Other causes of this are weak abductors.

Most of the time, we can resist the tendency of our knees to cave in by conscientiously focusing on pulling our knees outward as we rise out of a squat.

Because we’re talking about knee pain, we think of the knee joint, but a squat involves 3 joints, our hips, knees and ankles, and we need to think about all three when we squat.

Trying to keep our knees from going over our toes will affect the other joints and, in particular, are hips, with one study finding restricting the forward movement of the knees on the barbell squat inappropriately transfers the force to the hips and low back. Concluding appropriate joint loading during this exercise may require the knees to move slightly past the toes.”

I recently discovered that squats can cause hemorrhoids or plies.

And what it comes down to is breathing and bracing technique during the squat.

The way you breathe and brace for a high rep squat is different than when doing heavy low repetitions.

When we do a higher rep squat, we brace our core; this includes tightening our pelvic floor and glutes. Then we inhale as we descend, and once we reach the bottom, we might hold our breath briefly as we reverse direction and move out of the most challenging part of the squat, then we exhale, releasing internal pressure.

With a heavy squat, we do what’s called the Valsulva maneuver

This creates intra-abdominal pressure allowing for superior stabilization of the spine, which can cause hemorrhoids, especially when we push out of the bottom position. That’s why we need to brace against it by tightening our pelvic floor and glutes along with the rest of our core muscles.

https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article/88/4/427/2742305

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14636100/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31230110/

https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/12000/Squatting_Kinematics_and_Kinetics_and_Their.40.aspx#O4-40-6

https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/12000/Squatting_Kinematics_and_Kinetics_and_Their.40.aspx

https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2013/08000/The_Valsalva_Maneuver__Its_Effect_on.39.aspx