100 Squats a Day for Weight Loss
Maintaining a healthy weight is crucial for staving off a variety of diseases and adverse health conditions, but doing so can be difficult. Losing weight and keeping it off requires dedication and a committed effort to consuming fewer calories and exercising more.
Maintaining a healthy weight is crucial for staving off a variety of diseases and adverse health conditions, but doing so can be difficult. Losing weight and keeping it off requires dedication and a committed effort to consuming fewer calories and exercising more. As you might expect, many different workout plans can be useful for burning calories, but not all are efficient and some are less effective than others. Although performing 100 squats a day may help encourage weight loss, such a plan has drawbacks that make it less than ideal.
Why Squats?
The squat is just one of countless exercises that you can perform for weight loss, but it offers several advantages. First, the squat is a body-weight exercise, meaning it requires no equipment. Thus, you can conveniently perform the squat virtually anywhere so you have no excuses for missing a workout day. Additionally, the squat is a compound exercise, meaning it works multiple muscle groups. Compound exercises can be particularly effective for weight loss because the use of multiple, rather than just one, muscle group results in increased calorie burning.
High-Repetition Benefits
Performing large numbers of any exercise can be helpful because generally, the more work you perform the more calories you'll burn. In this way, performing 100 repetitions is preferable to 50 repetitions in terms of calorie burning. Research published in the December 2009 issue of "Diabetes Care" indicates that workouts featuring higher repetitions with lower resistance -- such as body-weight squats -- burned more calories than workouts featuring heavier weights and fewer repetitions.
Metabolic Effects
Outside of the calories burned during workouts, though, a 100-squats-per-day workout plan would not be ideal for weight loss. The same study indicating that high-repetition, low-resistance exercise burned more calories during workouts found that low-repetition, high-resistance workouts resulted in a raised metabolism for days afterward. In other words, lifting heavy weights will help you burn more calories for several days after each workout, while lifting lighter weights will not. Additionally, lower numbers of repetitions help build muscle rather than increase muscular endurance. Adding muscle is important because muscle tissue also boosts your metabolism.
Injury Risk
A significant factor you should consider before trying a workout program that involves 100 daily squats is the potential for injury. A routine that includes so much repetitive motion may put you at risk for overuse injuries, such as stress fractures or runner's knee. Additionally, the physical and pyschological toll of repeating the same compound exercise over and over may put you at risk for overtraining. If you overtrain, you may feel too tired to exercise and your performance as well as your mood may suffer.