Breathing Squats: Take It To The Next Level

Danish philosopher Sore Kierkegaard once wrote: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Unfortunately, with our focus on moving forward, the retrospective ‘understanding’ of life is all too often lost in the ether. With respect to health & fitness, a lot of the best training techniques have been lost because of a contemporary push for supplements (‘miracle pills’) to get us the results that our forefathers used nutrition and training to achieve.

Today, I wanted to get a little ‘archaic’ with you all and address one of these ‘lost’ - the Breathing Squat.

Why Squat?

We’ve all heard of the benefits of squats. No? Then let me tell you … As an exercise, they stimulate the quadriceps, leg biceps, lower back and glutes as well as increase the production of growth hormone and testosterone. This is great news for the guys, but what about the ladies? 

Good news - steroid-free weight training will never turn a girl into the Hulk. So, don’t let an unfounded and irrational fear stop you from enjoying the benefits of the squat rack. In fact, because squats recruit a large number of muscles when compared with isolation movements (e.g. leg extensions) this will translate to a greater total number of calories burned!

Squats …. On Another Level

The Breathing Squat will further increase all of the beneficial effects I just highlighted and make your regular squat look like a walk in the park.

While many variations of this program exist, the one I recommend involves a short warm-up and only one all-out set of 20 reps performed three times a week.

Breathing Squats: Technique

1. Take a weight with which you would normally perform 10 reps before failing.
2. Set up the bar in a Squat Rack with safety pins (very important).
3. Perform each repetition in a controlled way, with proper form, taking three deep breaths between each rep and exhaling forcefully (not overly so).
4. Immediately following your 20 reps, perform a set of 20 straight arm pullovers with a moderate weight, taking several breaths following each contraction and a deep breath at the peak of the movement.
5. Do this for one set, three times a week.

The Logic Behind It 

What you’re actually doing when you take the breaths is doing 20 single-rep seps with about 10 second rest-pauses between them. This enables you to recruit a higher number of muscle-fibers than you usually would if you just did 20 reps with no breaks. The reason why I recommend performing pullovers following the squats is to promote your rib-cage to stretch. This will allow more room for upper body growth, leading to serious muscle gains.

For intermediate bodybuilders you should be aiming to perform this movement with at least 100kg for any meaningful results.

For everyone else you can skip the dumbbell pullovers and use the exercise purely as a way of pre-exhausting your muscles before the rest of your workout, stimulating additional calorie expenditure, etc.