Source: http://evolutiontucson.com/scaling-squats-and-ankles/
I have had lots of thoughts going through my head of late, especially with all the noise out there in the “fitness” world. I recently had a potential member come to our facility to inquire about our training and it inspired me to write about the following.
This woman had been training at another facility that is into the whole HIIT(High Intensity Interval Training) thing. As we were getting into our initial consultation, she said that she hated squats and that she didn’t want to do them. I asked her why and she said she hated squats because she had lots of difficulty doing them. She said her current trainer would have her just do them anyway because she “needed to squat”. After I looked at her technique it was clear to me why she hated squats so much: they looked painful, and were mechanically a mess. As my friend Dan John would say, “Squatting isn’t causing that pain, whatever you’re doing is causing that pain.” Meaning she wasn’t squatting, she was moving up and down with disregard for proper movement. This statement is not a judgement on this woman, she was just doing what her trainer told her. My issue is that I see this kind of thing happen all the time. She kept using the word ‘scale’, as in her trainer would ‘scale’ the squats for her and have her do different variations of the movement so she could complete the workout with a modified squat. Though squatting to a …