How Many Squats A Day Do I Need To Do?

If you hadn’t noticed, the butt is having a moment. Gone are the early 2000s when having a big booty was a woman’s worst fear, so much so that it even coined the cliché question that boyfriends and husbands feared most – ‘does my butt look big in this?’.

Nowadays, with the likes of Ashley Graham, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashians leading the way, everybody wants a big derrière, but how do you achieve it? Is quantity more important than quality and do you really have to do 100 a day to see any results? Find out here.

Which muscles do squats work?

When you squat, all of your gluteal muscles are targeted as well as pretty much every other muscle in your body – sort of. While most people do squats to tone up the booty, they also target your quads, hamstrings and even your back muscle.

When we squat, we target two types of muscle fibers: fast twitch for power and slow twitch for endurance. In order to grow muscle, we have to break apart those fibers by adding resistance and doing them correctly.

How many squats a day do I need to be doing?

The 30-day squat challenges you see all over Instagram may seem like a great idea, but it can actually do you more harm than good. Without allowing your body to rest, you risk overtraining your muscles and causing damage. Your aim shouldn’t be quantity, it should be frequency and intensity.

We recommend you do a minimum of three sets per exercise and then vary the repetitions in the range of five to fifteen.

– RELATED: Here’s How To Use The Squat Rack Properly –

Do I need weights?

You also need to be adding resistance, otherwise you won’t see any change. You wouldn’t do bicep curls without a dumbbell, would you? Our butt is a muscle and needs to be treated as such.

Don’t start off with a 60kg barbell on your shoulders, start small and as it gets easier, add more weight. Your last two reps should be hard but not impossible and your shoulders shouldn’t ache the next day.

Squat low, squat well and squat often.

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