 Let's discuss squatting for older people, right? So the squat is a fundamental movement that is pretty unique in its way that it trains all of your mobility, right? So to squat down, I need ankle mobility, I need knee mobility, I need hip mobility, and I need to oppose gravity and maintain my balance while I do it all. So this is a really good pattern to train throughout your life, whether or not you load it really heavy or even use it as a sort of exercise or training tool, it's still a good way to keep your function levels high and make sure that you maintain good flexibility and mobility throughout the rest of your life. So whenever I have someone who, let's say, I'm gonna tell you a specific example, I have one client who has a couple joint replacements and by a couple, I mean three, not two. So for her, squatting is a very good indicator of her function. So we can use that to say, okay, can you get up and down safely? Can you get on the ground without falling over? Can you try to hold yourself up without using your hand? Can you walk without your cane? These are all good improvements that you'll see with squatting. So first thing that I wanna talk about is squatting a little bit safer. So you wanna have a fallback mechanism in case you fall back that you're not getting extra injured. So what we're gonna do, I'm gonna grab this chair that's in this room here. And this is a bad example because this chair tilts like this, it swivels, but you can use a sturdier variation of this chair or even this chair to some extent and kind of quantify how low you're going and use it as, again, a fallback mechanism. So with any squat, I'm just gonna take some stance that's a little bit more comfortable. For an elderly population, I'm not usually gonna give them a powerlifting position kind of squat where the feet are really wide and I try to place emphasis on using the glutes or whatever, all I want is all of your body to be working here. So I'm gonna move my feet in a little bit more so it transfers a little better to daily life so it looks a little bit more like I'm supporting my weight underneath me or using my feet to support my weight. And as I sit back, I can either just tap the chair and come back up and then use that to do a few reps. Okay, if that's too tall, I can lower the chair and now we try again and I can still tap like this. One thing that you're gonna notice in every population that you train is if you're using something like this and the depth is out of your comfort zone, you're gonna start shifting your weight forward. People don't feel as comfortable using their glutes and their hamstrings and that's why personal training can be very effective because you have someone there to say, no, that was wrong, try again. So again, what you're gonna see, people shift forward like this, their knees collapse in, their feet collapse down and then they can still try to tap and maintain function but their knees won't feel as good and they won't get as long lasting of a training benefit from it. So what I want here is I want you to sit back when you're coming down and then explode back up as fast as you can, right? Big things are I don't want your toes to come up when you're sitting back. That means you're shifting too far back. I have a video on that if you need more info. Don't shift forward to support your weight on your knees. Some sort of middle ground balance is best. Now we talked about tapping the chair and then coming back up. I like that variation because it keeps the load on the muscles and it replicates maintaining your balance. So instead of having this sit on the chair all the way and fall backward and then lean into it again, where I'm actually teaching you to fall back, I have to use this as, I use this as again a fallback mechanism but I'm still training my legs, training my balance in a more functional way. And then the progression then is to just take this chair out of the equation and then do the same thing without it. So we've talked about kind of the mechanisms of it. Physiologically, how do I ensure that I'm getting a workout? Well, the big thing is you can't rest a whole lot because I think a lot of people who do this, whether you're elderly or not, are going to think that this is kind of easy or not too bad at least. And so the way that you're going to increase the difficulty is you're going to increase the number of reps that you do, maybe even 25, maybe even 50 if you're able to maintain your positions, maintain that sitting back at the bottom and don't rest at the top. So oftentimes what you'll see is this and then this. So you want to increase the pace of the exercise so that maybe you're not even locking your joints out at the top, you're just coming right back down. Now you can still do the exercise kind of slowly to make sure you're maintaining the right positions. If you feel yourself falling forward at the bottom, you can stop and you can shift your weight back a little bit and then you can keep going. You can even throw in a little hold at the bottom, which we've talked about before as well, where you're squatting down and then you're building up fatigue by holding this disadvantaged position. You feel your legs burn a little bit and then you come back up. So that's another good way of saying, hey, sit there for a second, make sure you have your balance. So again, squatting really good for all populations, especially the elderly populations, make sure you keep up that mobility, keep up that function as you get older.