Squatting Every Day for Slim Legs

Fitness trainers call squats the king of the royal family of leg exercises -- and with good reason. Done correctly, they don’t make your legs or butt big, and they don’t hurt your knees. Squats do, however, create tremendous everyday strength and improvement in your athletic performance for ground-based sports, notes Lori Incledon in “Strength Training for Women.” If you want to squat every day to achieve slim legs, you’ll have to pay close attention to how you design your workout program.

  1. 30-Day Challenges

    • Squat challenges are the latest rage, and require you to throw out the window the notion of letting those glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves recover for 48 hours between bouts of intense resistance training. You mark your calendar for three squat days in a row, changing up the types of body-weight squats to include the sumo variation and side kicks, followed by a fourth day of rest. This pattern is repeated until you complete the month. Your goal is not necessarily slim legs per se, but certainly sculpted ones.

    Alternating Intensity

    • You can also perform barbell squats daily, notes Olympic weightlifting coach Nick Horton. The key is alternate light and heavy workout days. Kettlebell squats can also be done daily, following the identical principle of alternating light and heavy sessions. Kettlebells offer the further advantage of being usable not only for regular squats, swing squats and goblet squats, but also hack squats when held against the small of the back and one-legged squats when held in front by the horns.

    Impact on the Legs

    • “Certainly squats are helpful in developing strong, shapely legs,” notes fitness expert Irene Lewis-McCormick, author of “A Woman’s Guide to Muscle and Strength.” However, squats are intended to work the gluteals primarily, not the thighs, she adds. When she sees a woman with a flat butt who has overdeveloped quads, she immediately suspects that she's not performing her squats correctly. “Likely, the squat technique is wrong and she is doing too much hip flexion in her squat, dropping the torso down as if ‘bowing’ as opposed to maintaining an upright posture,” McCormick observes.

    Considerations

    • For best results in terms of slimming your hip and leg muscles, bring your thighs as close to parallel to the floor as possible. “Think about maintaining a crown of jewels on your head as you lower your tailbone to the floor,” McCormick advises. If you focus on the glutes, “the legs will follow and will develop nicely,” she adds. “Also, genetics plays a large role in muscle development, so one individual’s response to squatting will not necessarily be the same as another’s.”