Exercise Plan - The Squat

My name is Margie Weiss and this is Womens Fixit Zone. The first exercise that we generally do is a squat, and the reason is that the squat uses the main muscles of the thighs, one of the biggest muscle groups in the body, and therefore youre going to use the most amount of calories during this workout. There are four quad muscles, hence the name quad. Its a muscle in front of the thigh, two of them are around top of each other so they work as one. We have got one on the inner side and one on the outer side. So, were going to do squat in three different positions. The first one is the regular squat, feet about shoulder width apart, toes turned out maybe a little bit. With your weights you can either put them at your waist, you can put them at your shoulders, or you can do no weights at all. All were going to do is bend into the squat just as we do in the warm up and come back up. Now, you may want to do eight to ten, 12 repetitions of this, tucking your belly to your backbone and sitting backwards. Notice that the knees remain behind the toes for safety, the back is in neutral position as is the neck, so that the eyes remain still as you go up and down. More repetitions and were going to do -- were just going to show you the positions. The second position youre going to just bring your feet together, squeezing your knees together and your inner thighs together, pretend like you got a credit card between your knees, youre sitting back. Again, the knees still remain behind the toes, which makes this a real little tougher. If you want to go a little bit lower, you could always take your hands out in front of you, reaching forwards gives you a counterbalance as you go down. You can bring them back in or you can just hold them out as you do this. If you really squeeze your knees and inner thighs together and your glute is on the way up, its going to be a really good workout for the outer thigh. One more position, were going to turn our toes out, fairly wide squat here. As you go down, this is like ballet, second position, youre going to tuck your hips under, you got some weight on your baby toe, and as you come up pretend like you got a rubber band from your knee to your hip, and youre drawing up and in, squeezing the glutes. Pretend like you have a penny in your glutes, squeeze as you rise and control it. Keeping the knees soft in all three positions, soft meaning not locked out. When you go down, 90 is about as far as youre going to go, then youre going to come up. In order to get out safely, if you have the weight at the shoulders, drop them by your sides, walk it on in and shake it out. Just stretch the quads if you want, at this point you can just grab a foot and press it toward your hips. Shaken out, exercise number one done.