@jayaraj A couple things, the testerone from squats is an acute spike that does little to nothing for muscle growth. And that same increase in testosterone occurs under heavy resistance training. The athletic increases by squat can be made by a ton of other exercises. Split squats, front squats, trap bar deadlifts, and cleans probably have better athletic carry over then the squat does. Your CNS would most likely be allowed to recover much quicker because of how systemically draining squats are. And your "core" can be trained better in a more specific fashion. QL Bends, Weighted Crunches, and RDL's will do miles more for your "core" then the squats ever could. The Leg Press is miles more stable, most likely you are going to grow your quads better with the leg press then the squat. There's no must do exercises period, if you really think an exercise doesn't fit your structure or your programming there's no rule that you must keep it in.
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Am I missing out if I dont squat ?
- Thread starter jayaraj
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@jayaraj They aren't necessary for hypertrophy at all. What you're missing out on is strengthening a very functional movement pattern that translates into real life movement. All of the additional full body strengthening that comes with spinal loading as well.
I personally love the barbell squat but I do agree that they can be a drag sometimes. Could keep them in your training with reduced intensity to keep the groove greased.
I personally love the barbell squat but I do agree that they can be a drag sometimes. Could keep them in your training with reduced intensity to keep the groove greased.
@jayaraj Don't dodge hardship, embrace it. Why not try to reduce the amount of sets you do before you ditch them completely? 1-2 working sets of squats per session may be more than enough. But at the end of the day it is more important to pick an exercise that you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life
@jayaraj I assume by squats you specifically mean the barbell back squat. Dorian Yates wasn't comfortable with the squat after a hip injury. Dr. Mike claims he never saw Phil Heath touch barbells, as well as claiming that barbell compounds are a puny fraction of an IFBB pros program. You can safely drop the squat from your program without worrying too much.
As for athletic ability, its not a simple matter of you squat and become athletic. Plenty of bros here practicing and preaching the back squat as the holy grail of unleashing athletic potential, while lacking the mobility to front squat or pistol squat, or lacking the cardio for a session of sprints. Fierce wrestlers like Karelin and Lopez are functionally superior to any of us here simply by throwing men around all day. Like wise plenty of football elite of athletic ability merely dabble in weights, with the back squat IF they even want to do it at all, being an impotent afterthought in their training behind priorities like plyometric jumps and sprints.
Unless you wish to be strong at squatting with a heavy weight on your shoulders, I wouldn't worry about the specific carry over that a back squat gives you, arguably front squatting and dead lifting have better athletic carry over. After all, no one picks a stone off the ground better than Tom Stoltman, who can be observed dead lifting it into a front squat position. Sounds like you have your core sorted with RDLs and ab work, I'm sure you bent over row too, so long as you provide your erectors and abs with enough volume you won't need the squat.
I assume by CNS you mean peaking? That's usually skill specific and since you are avoiding squats, I suppose you don't need to peak for the back squat. If you mean CNS in some way of training your body to buffer higher levels of fatigue, or perform at high levels of intensity then train a conventional dead lift with higher volume and frequency for this purpose maybe? Sounds odd to me, especially as you mention testosterone levels. Where are you lads getting this crazy garbage about exercise selection for testosterone production? Use your balls man, its their job. Eat well, sleep well, don't over do your training and have healthy relationships and they'll make all that you need... unless you actually have clinically significant low levels that create real symptoms then see a doctor about that. But if you heard from some dude on the internet jacked on PEDs to worry about your testosterone, then clearly they are trying to sell you their TEST MAX doodle enlarger pre-workout supplement, all while racking up the views on their channel with their clickbait 'number one exercise variation to boost testosterone 3x' video.
As for athletic ability, its not a simple matter of you squat and become athletic. Plenty of bros here practicing and preaching the back squat as the holy grail of unleashing athletic potential, while lacking the mobility to front squat or pistol squat, or lacking the cardio for a session of sprints. Fierce wrestlers like Karelin and Lopez are functionally superior to any of us here simply by throwing men around all day. Like wise plenty of football elite of athletic ability merely dabble in weights, with the back squat IF they even want to do it at all, being an impotent afterthought in their training behind priorities like plyometric jumps and sprints.
Unless you wish to be strong at squatting with a heavy weight on your shoulders, I wouldn't worry about the specific carry over that a back squat gives you, arguably front squatting and dead lifting have better athletic carry over. After all, no one picks a stone off the ground better than Tom Stoltman, who can be observed dead lifting it into a front squat position. Sounds like you have your core sorted with RDLs and ab work, I'm sure you bent over row too, so long as you provide your erectors and abs with enough volume you won't need the squat.
I assume by CNS you mean peaking? That's usually skill specific and since you are avoiding squats, I suppose you don't need to peak for the back squat. If you mean CNS in some way of training your body to buffer higher levels of fatigue, or perform at high levels of intensity then train a conventional dead lift with higher volume and frequency for this purpose maybe? Sounds odd to me, especially as you mention testosterone levels. Where are you lads getting this crazy garbage about exercise selection for testosterone production? Use your balls man, its their job. Eat well, sleep well, don't over do your training and have healthy relationships and they'll make all that you need... unless you actually have clinically significant low levels that create real symptoms then see a doctor about that. But if you heard from some dude on the internet jacked on PEDs to worry about your testosterone, then clearly they are trying to sell you their TEST MAX doodle enlarger pre-workout supplement, all while racking up the views on their channel with their clickbait 'number one exercise variation to boost testosterone 3x' video.
@jayaraj As a heads up, I will be using some terminology developed by Mike Isratel as they are useful for describing certain aspects of lifting.
As a novice you will want to include a vertical and horizontal variation for your back work, cable rows are perfectly fine for developing back thickness although a narrow row will in most people feel like it activates their lats a bit more, which is perfect if growing your lats is a priority, however as a novice its usually best practice to employ lifts that engage as much musculature as possible with as few variations as possible that focus on lifts with bilateral inputs, to allow your body to build the technique, discipline and mind-muscle connection to the lifts, making the bent over row a top pick.
Bent over rows are a lot like the back squat, they are heavy compounds which hit a lot of muscles at once, providing heavy stimulation and sufficient volumes all around to maximise growth in the novice. Mike Isratel would refer to this as RSM (Raw Stimulus Magnitude), where you are doing a lot of work to a lot of muscles with a lot of intensity, and these tend to almost always be heavy compounds. This tends to create a lot of stimulation, but also a lot of fatigue. A novice benefits from high RSM exercises because the stimulation is maximised optimally in relation to your fatigue and volume landmarks. In simpler terms, as a novice you don't need many sets to grow muscle and you also cannot do as much sets as an advanced lifter can before you become too fatigued and cannot recover in time for the next session. Because you are growing from such low weekly volumes, you can easily recover week to week from programming exercises that have high RSM.
As you become more advanced, you will find you cannot program in more sets of high RSM lifts because you will reach a point where the effort required to lift will either fatigue you so badly that you cannot recover from session to session and therefore fail to progress, or your supporting musculature (i.e, spinal erectors or grip on the dead lift) will not be able to keep up with the volume the exercise requires. This is the reason why advanced lifters program in machines and isolation work, because it allows them to increase the sets required for a muscle group to grow while reducing the fatigue accumulated from lifting. Mike calls this SFR (Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio). Machines and isolation work allows for high SFRs, because they are often designed to make a particular muscle work hard, while giving the other assisting muscles that are blasted in high RSM lifts, a holiday. In the context of rows, a cable row is an excellent high SFR accessory that you can program in with the bent over row and dead lift that an intermediate lifter may program in to add weekly volume and keep increasing their back thickness, despite their spinal erectors throwing in the towel.
As a good rule, from your novice stage you should be familiar and have a core of rotating high RSM lifts. As you become more advanced over time you will program in lifts that shift more and more towards higher SFRs. For example, as a novice you will work the bench press for overall chest development in the 5 - 10 rep range. As you get more advanced you will include a moderate intensity variation that allows you to add volume and stay within your fatigue window, such as an incline DB press for 10 - 15 reps. As you get more advanced, you now have more fatigue to manage and less to dedicate to growth, you specifically choose very high SFR exercises to add volume, in this example you add cable chest flies in the 10 - 20 rep range. Of course, find out which rep ranges work best for which parts of your body. Body parts often have varying percentages of muscle fibre types, but as a generally rule 10 - 20 reps is a sweet and brainless spot for all fibre types, but don't be afraid to do sets of 6 if you feel like muscle is all fast twitch, like wise grind reps up to 20 if its slow twitch.
Regardless of what I tell you, you need to tailor your program to your body and mind. If you hate bent over rows, if they demolish your willpower before your back, if they cause you pain, if you lack the flexibility to bend over enough etc, don't be afraid to scrap them for alternatives. Chest supported rows, seal rows, cable machine rows, body weight rows, these are a few that are all excellent and I'm sure there are many more. To be honest, I hardly bent over row myself. My spinal erectors have lagged so far behind my upper back that I start to round and lose spinal integrity halfway through my sets and this happens even at lighter weights for higher reps, so like you I cable row a lot.
The main take away here is that machine rows of all kinds are perfectly fine for developing back thickness, but I encourage you to learn the bent over row and program it in for 2 months and see how it goes for you. Because its a high RSM lift and you are novice, it very likely will give you the greatest gains for the time spent lifting in the beginning of your lifting journey. Finally, always remember Phil Health, he is proof you can live on machines and get huge, so you can tell the rest of us to sod off if we give you too much grief over not doing enough barbells.
As a novice you will want to include a vertical and horizontal variation for your back work, cable rows are perfectly fine for developing back thickness although a narrow row will in most people feel like it activates their lats a bit more, which is perfect if growing your lats is a priority, however as a novice its usually best practice to employ lifts that engage as much musculature as possible with as few variations as possible that focus on lifts with bilateral inputs, to allow your body to build the technique, discipline and mind-muscle connection to the lifts, making the bent over row a top pick.
Bent over rows are a lot like the back squat, they are heavy compounds which hit a lot of muscles at once, providing heavy stimulation and sufficient volumes all around to maximise growth in the novice. Mike Isratel would refer to this as RSM (Raw Stimulus Magnitude), where you are doing a lot of work to a lot of muscles with a lot of intensity, and these tend to almost always be heavy compounds. This tends to create a lot of stimulation, but also a lot of fatigue. A novice benefits from high RSM exercises because the stimulation is maximised optimally in relation to your fatigue and volume landmarks. In simpler terms, as a novice you don't need many sets to grow muscle and you also cannot do as much sets as an advanced lifter can before you become too fatigued and cannot recover in time for the next session. Because you are growing from such low weekly volumes, you can easily recover week to week from programming exercises that have high RSM.
As you become more advanced, you will find you cannot program in more sets of high RSM lifts because you will reach a point where the effort required to lift will either fatigue you so badly that you cannot recover from session to session and therefore fail to progress, or your supporting musculature (i.e, spinal erectors or grip on the dead lift) will not be able to keep up with the volume the exercise requires. This is the reason why advanced lifters program in machines and isolation work, because it allows them to increase the sets required for a muscle group to grow while reducing the fatigue accumulated from lifting. Mike calls this SFR (Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio). Machines and isolation work allows for high SFRs, because they are often designed to make a particular muscle work hard, while giving the other assisting muscles that are blasted in high RSM lifts, a holiday. In the context of rows, a cable row is an excellent high SFR accessory that you can program in with the bent over row and dead lift that an intermediate lifter may program in to add weekly volume and keep increasing their back thickness, despite their spinal erectors throwing in the towel.
As a good rule, from your novice stage you should be familiar and have a core of rotating high RSM lifts. As you become more advanced over time you will program in lifts that shift more and more towards higher SFRs. For example, as a novice you will work the bench press for overall chest development in the 5 - 10 rep range. As you get more advanced you will include a moderate intensity variation that allows you to add volume and stay within your fatigue window, such as an incline DB press for 10 - 15 reps. As you get more advanced, you now have more fatigue to manage and less to dedicate to growth, you specifically choose very high SFR exercises to add volume, in this example you add cable chest flies in the 10 - 20 rep range. Of course, find out which rep ranges work best for which parts of your body. Body parts often have varying percentages of muscle fibre types, but as a generally rule 10 - 20 reps is a sweet and brainless spot for all fibre types, but don't be afraid to do sets of 6 if you feel like muscle is all fast twitch, like wise grind reps up to 20 if its slow twitch.
Regardless of what I tell you, you need to tailor your program to your body and mind. If you hate bent over rows, if they demolish your willpower before your back, if they cause you pain, if you lack the flexibility to bend over enough etc, don't be afraid to scrap them for alternatives. Chest supported rows, seal rows, cable machine rows, body weight rows, these are a few that are all excellent and I'm sure there are many more. To be honest, I hardly bent over row myself. My spinal erectors have lagged so far behind my upper back that I start to round and lose spinal integrity halfway through my sets and this happens even at lighter weights for higher reps, so like you I cable row a lot.
The main take away here is that machine rows of all kinds are perfectly fine for developing back thickness, but I encourage you to learn the bent over row and program it in for 2 months and see how it goes for you. Because its a high RSM lift and you are novice, it very likely will give you the greatest gains for the time spent lifting in the beginning of your lifting journey. Finally, always remember Phil Health, he is proof you can live on machines and get huge, so you can tell the rest of us to sod off if we give you too much grief over not doing enough barbells.
dissappointed
New member
@jayaraj You could use squatting as a means to attain a higher “cap” for other squatting movements through neuromuscular adaptation, then make your main quad movement something like belt squat or bulgarian split squats that isn’t as taxing.
I do consider the squat a full-body exercise and an essential though. Nothing activates the nervous system like the squat.
I do consider the squat a full-body exercise and an essential though. Nothing activates the nervous system like the squat.
willorie1329
New member
@jayaraj Alot of People will Tell you how to avoid squats but at the end of the day 95% of them do Not have the physique you‘d like to have…
It feels you waste too much stamina? Come on man lol
You dont feel benchpress the way you feel cable crossover either but its still important… dont fool yourself
It feels you waste too much stamina? Come on man lol
You dont feel benchpress the way you feel cable crossover either but its still important… dont fool yourself
dontreallyknow
New member
@jayaraj Dorian yate never Squatted, John meadows didn't either and many more. Your body doesn't care if its a machine à dumbell or a barbell as long as there is muscle tension. I stopped squatting years ago and i dont look back. Hacksquat, legpress with leg extension or sysy squat is all you need for quad. Play with feet position to put the amphasis on différent part. On machine you can do rest pause, drop set and push til failure which is dangerous with squat Leg curl and RDL for hamstring is all you need.
Bulgarian squat could be good to get a good stretch, personally i really hate doing unilateral exercice so i dont do them.
Bulgarian squat could be good to get a good stretch, personally i really hate doing unilateral exercice so i dont do them.
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