I DECIDED TO SQUAT EVERY DAY IN OCTOBER — HERE'S WHAT I LEARNED
Following the Squatober plan was one of my best fitness decisions.
Squats have been called the king of lifts. Once you drape a loaded bar across your back and drop your ass to the grass, most major muscle groups, including your hamstrings, quads, core muscles, and upper back, are put to work.
Any workout program that doesn't include the squat is, frankly speaking, not worth your time or money. But would you follow a program that focuses solely on squats? I did, and it was one of the best decisions I made.
I know, I know — you're probably going to say something like, "That's horrible for your knees." I heard plenty of that when I told people I’d be squatting every day for the month of October (well, every weekday, with weekends off) as part of a social media campaign known as Squatober.
At the end of the month, not only were my knees just fine, but my squat max went up 35 pounds (from 225 to 260), my overall strengthincreased, I lost some body fat, and I learned some valuable life lessons along the way.
What is Squatober? It's the brain child of Aaron Ausmus, the head strength and conditioning coach for the University of Southern California’s football team, and Bert Sorinex, president and co-owner of exercise equipment company Sorinex.
“We really wanted to just find a way to bring attention to this really great, but under-appreciated lift,” Bert told Muscle & Fitness. “But we were just kind of joking around at first.”
That is, until Ausmus—who writes the workout plan for Squatober—actually squatted every day for a month and found just how beneficial it was. The two started promoting it on social media about five years ago, and now more than 50,000 people follow the @penandpaperstrengthapp page that posts each day’s workout.
“It’s been absolutely great to see the response,” Bert says. “We’ve had great responses from other schools and their strength and conditioning departments.”
Here's a primer on Squatober, why I decided to do it, and the lessons it taught me.
Anthony O'Reilly is an associate editor at Muscle & Fitness.
Before Squatober began, I needed to figure out my training max. Ausmus had a simple tip for figuring that out on Sorinex’s website: “Pick a weight that if you drove for 6 hours, you could still get out of your car, do a short warm-up, and hit that weight.” For me, that was 225 pounds.
Starting Sept. 30, @penandpaperstrengthapp Instagram page would upload the next day’s workout routine. It started off relatively easy, 5 reps at 35 percent of my max and progressing to 9 reps at 65 percent.
Predictably, the days got harder. On Day 9, we were ordered to do a seesaw set and rep scheme with 4 reps at 70 percent, followed by 2 at 80, then 4 at 70 and so on for eight total sets. More challenging than that, was climbing my apartment stairs that same night.
It wasn’t all squats, though, as the plan had us doing bench presses, overhead presses, and Romanian deadlifts on certain days. “This is basically how Aaron trains his athletes,” Bert says.
Despite working at a place called Muscle & Fitness, I'm relatively new to lifting—and fitness, for that matter. At the end of 2018, I was over 260 pounds (all fat). Not only that, I was incredibly weak and hadn't stepped into a gym in years.
Flash forward to September 2019, I was hovering around 220 pounds (some muscle) and living a much healtheir lifestyle. One afternoon, an article about Squatober flashed across my smartphone and the headline piqued my curiosity enough for me to click on it. It sounded promising; Here was a program, I thought, that promised increased strength and marked improvement in the gym.
What did I have to lose? At the very least, it would make an interesting story for work.
Photo by Andrey_Popov via Shutterstock