This is a really frequent question from almost all the people who want to exercise, but still don’t have so much information. I have seen many other professionals of my area saying that 90º Squats are safer, that you can’t pass your knees in front of your toes, and etc. Actually, I did 90º squats for many years, with not so good results, to be honest. Well, let’s go to the facts. It is NOT correct to stop at 90º when squatting, for many reasons, and this is scientific. A quick search on google will show you millions of scientific articles speaking about squats. I will point some characteristics of the deep squats comparing to the 90º squats:

1 – the bigger the range of motion used in the eccentric phase of the movement, the bigger will be the recruitment of motor units (motor neuron + muscle fibers that coordinate the contraction of a single muscle) boosting the gains in strength and muscle mass. Its results are much better when compared to 90º squats.

2 – when it comes to lower back pain, it is noted an increased compression in the spine that goes from 6 to 10 times your body weight, being possible to reach 20 times body weight in 90º squats, using loads 0,8 to 1,6 times body weight. In deep squats, there is dorsiflexion, which reduces activity of the spine erectors, consequently reducing this compression and preventing back pain (with proper form of execution).

3 – about the knees, Escamilla et al. 2001 shows the increase of tibiofemoral and patellofemoral compression in the angles of 80º to 90º, decreasing right after this angulation, and even more as the range of motion increases. If you stop at 90º, you are cancelling the eccentric phase of the movement, “freezing” the muscles that are stabilizing the movement. There are many more muscles involved in squats than quadriceps and glutes. That’s exactly (90º) when the patellar and the quadriceps tendon “suffer”. If you go below 90º you are protecting your joints, because the hamstrings start “cancelling” this stress in your tendons (with proper form).

Much more than an exercise, deep squats are a movement pattern. Watch a 3 year old baby squatting and you will see. Of course there are huge anatomical differences between us and babies, with the babies having way shorter legs, facilitating leverage for squatting. But if you would consider that as a determining factor, I at 1,97m with extremely long femurs wouldn’t be able to squat as deep and heavy as I do. Work on mobility, balance out strength levels between muscle groups in your body and you will be ready for it.

Full squats (or deep squats) not only transfer strength better to partial squats (Pallares et al. 2020), but they also hypertrophy more gluteus and adductors (Kubo et al. 2019), and half squats were shown to increment pain and discomfort after continued training (Pallares, et al. 2020). So instead of spending hours and hours on the adductor and abductor machines, work on your mobility so you can squat deeper. Hire a coach that will make you improve what you have to improve so you can squat deeper, have healthier knees and spine.

SQUAT!!!