Squats

What is a squat?

The Visualization

You stand with your legs shoulder width apart and slowly lower yourself into a sitting position, holding yourself up with the strength of your thighs, your abs and your lower back muscles. You raise yourself up and lower yourself again, feeling your muscles support your weight as you do.

You do this easily ten times, raising your body to a standing position and lowering it down again into a sitting position. Raising and lowering, raising and lowering, raising and lowering. six times, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….

Finally the repetition has started to build a stiffness in the muscles supporting you and your calves are feeling hot. You ignore the burn and continue raising your body to a standing position and lowering it down again into a sitting position. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen...

It's your abs that start to kill you before anything else. You’re acutely aware of the stiff burning muscles in your core as you lower yourself onto your thighs that are beginning to shake with the exertion of lifting the weight of your upper body. You’re not ready to give up and you breathe heavily to distract your focus from your aching muscles. You raise your body and lower it into a sitting position and this time you think you won’t be able to push yourself up, but you draw your strength from the powerful muscles in your back. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two….

You lower yourself again and your thighs tremble. You breath. You raise your body again, feeling the ache in your thighs and abs as they lift your torso up again, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six…

Your whole body is killing you. You feel like you have a fifty pound sack of potatoes on your shoulders. The only thing keeping you going is knowing that you only have four more squats to go. You clench your teeth in agony as you count them out, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, THIRTY.

You drop to the floor. Your muscles are burning, especially your thighs, abs and calves. You grab your water bottle and gulp down. You can already tell your muscles are going to be sore tomorrow.