Are Squats Dangerous?
Q: Are squats dangerous? See, I love walking all over my significant other and I kinda need good knees to continue doing that. Well, not really because I don’t literally walk all over my partner to do something beneficial like an Ashiatsu massage to help relieve their stress, for example. Instead, how I walk all over them is figuratively by treating them badly and without respect. But still, you get the point!
A: There’s a prevailing belief that squatting places stress on the knees and can lead to knee pain and/or result in damage to the joint. This is especially the argument when it comes to squatting to 90 degrees and beyond. That fear surrounding squats, however, is largely unfounded.
Countless studies show that squatting is not damaging but beneficial for the knees.1For example, squatting can help prevent arthritis or slow down its progression by strengthening the muscles around the knee structure. There’s also research that suggests that squatting below parallel is no more dangerous than partial squats. In fact, some research suggests that partial squats are more harmful to the knees than deep squats because squatting to shallow depth doesn’t allow for the hamstrings and quadriceps to minimize the shearing forces on the knee’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
That’s what the research says about the safety of squatting.
But hey, you don’t have to believe it!
After all, we’re living in a time that may very well be recorded in the annals of history as the Age of the Death of Expertise due to a growing number of people openly rejecting the work and knowledge of professionals in their field in favor of subjective information, such as that based on personal feelings, opinions, and perceptions.
So yeah, disregard the science that squatting is healthy and that the experience of pain or discomfort from it is not because of anything inherent but due to the use of too much weight, improper form, or existence of a known or unknown condition or injury to the knee, such as osteoarthritis, patellofemoral pain syndrome (i.e. runner’s knee), or a meniscus tear.
Yup, shove that aside and believe instead that there’s something like a vast conspiracy that involves scientists finding squats as a viable exercise in their fancy academic journals. And in exchange for telling the public that squats are perfectly safe, they receive kickbacks from orthopedics and physical therapists for helping to keep the sports medicine industry afloat by herding people toward injury and in need of their pricey services to fix them.
Yeah, go ahead and trample on the facts with as much fervor as you trample on your significant other!
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: fitness, lifting form, nutrition, squat, squats
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