 How often should you squat? So common question I get and it doesn't really mean anything without any context So let's play through some scenarios So if you're talking about squatting generally you're trying to you know improve that squat the squat is the goal So in that case how often should I squat? Well? How are you measuring your improvement? If you are using it to build muscle? It's okay to do it every day There what's the small of squat program you should look that up. That's pretty gutter So so muscularly we're trying to fatigue the muscle the big thing about putting on muscle is I need a Protein surplus I need to push the muscle to some brink of exertion So that it feels like I can't do anything else that it doesn't have to be heavy It doesn't have to be light. It just has to be really difficult so we need that protein surplus and that caloric surplus on top of this Mechanical stress that we're putting on or this physiological stress that we're putting on the muscle So that's like how often should I squat for? gaining muscle mass it's you know as much as you want at least once a week you if you're gonna only do it once a Week you're gonna want to really push yourself to the brink and if you're gonna do it Seven days a week. You're probably not gonna make each workout the hardest workout of your life You can and you can try to do that and if your body starts to break down just dial it back a little bit, but I You know like the main premise that I want you to get out of this is Push yourself, but only as much as you can tolerate right and you know Maybe a little bit more than you can tolerate right because we have to be uncomfortable when we're training Or else there's no growth that happens So squatting Frequency when I'm trying to gain muscle mass You know as much as you want whatever fits into your schedule My basic rule is whatever will get you to do it consistently So if you do seven days a week and you don't you eventually you stop and you don't squat at all You don't work out at all because seven days a week was just too much So I might as well not do anything then seven days a week is the wrong frequency for you Likewise, if you're not noticing any muscle gains and you're pretty experienced Then maybe one day a week is not enough for you or if you can't spare more than a 50 minute workout You can't come in and expect to just Demolish your your legs your quads your glutes whatever you can't expect to demolish all of those in 50 minutes once a week. So maybe you need to split it up Maybe you do upper body lower body days where one day you're doing a lower body squat day, you know And then Tuesday, you know Monday you do that Tuesday you do upper body Maybe Wednesday you take off and then you repeat the cycle So those are ideas for muscle gain now how often choose you squat if you're trying to get stronger Now that's a little bit different. So Strength requires that you're taxing the nervous system. How are you going to tax the nervous system? Well, you need force Force is a mass being accelerated, right? So either I move a lighter load really quickly Or I move a heavier load slowly So the heavier load slowly looks more like strength looks more like maximal effort method Heavy squats grinding through reps And that is helpful for this But it's not the only thing you have to do even the guys at West Side do dynamic effort method stuff because they need to Tax the the power development side of force the the faster side of force the speed side of force So in those cases I could squat heavy once a week and then maybe a dynamic effort is faster method One other day a week. So that that would lead me to about two Instead of the dynamic effort stuff the fast stuff. Maybe you do more of a repetition effort I didn't intend for this to be a conjugate education kind of talk but power lifters will also use this repetition effort method, which is basically bodybuilding but in nerdy power lifter language So repetition effort is kind of what we were talking about before you're pushing those muscles to the brink you're you're demolishing them Right, so they're really fatigued I Had a story I want to end with a story. So a friend of mine and Another friend of mine were talking just last week and one of them said if somebody held a gun to your head and said they were gonna murder everyone you know and like on Unless you could squat 500 pounds next month You wouldn't try to come up with the best plan you would just squat every damn day and I I think we get caught up trying to optimize things and It's easy for us to stop putting in the work so Let me leave you with that put in the work