Are Squats Really Bad for Your Back?
If you’ve ever trained for a military fitness test, or been forced to take a presidential fitness test in gym class, you know what squats are. Someone holds your legs and you sit down as many times as you can before the test is over. But then again, you may have also heard that squats are bad for your back and that all those PE teachers were wrong and we should be doing crunches or planks instead. So what’s the deal?
Where do squats come from
It’s a little strange when you think that squats should be something special at all. In what world would we have to constantly lie down and sit down until our stomach hurts? Why do we even train?
Squats have been included in military and paramilitary fitness tests due to concerns about the backs of military personnel. Studies have shown that people with weak abdominal muscles are more likely to suffer from back pain and injury. (That idea has since been questioned , but that’s another story.) Specifically, the problem wasn’t abdominal strength, but abdominal endurance: How long can your core muscles work without failure?
The squat test was the answer to that question. If a recruit can repeatedly contract his abdominal muscles, he must have good abdominal endurance. Getting up from a prone position on the ground really requires a lot of work from the abdominal muscles. Problem solved, right?
The problem with squats
Squats can hurt your back. This is not the same as saying that squats are bad for the back – we’re getting to that – but people often report that their back hurts after a lot of squats.
How can this happen? Well, let’s have a quick anatomy lesson.
The main muscle that should work when squatting is the rectus abdominis, the six-pack muscle. It runs lengthwise from the chest to the pelvis, and as it contracts, the front of the chest approaches the front of the pelvis. It also does some of the work of keeping the torso stable in various positions. (The muscles of the back and sides also contribute.)
But we also have muscles called hip flexors that serve to bring the hips closer to the torso. Imagine curling up into a fetal position; The hip flexors are the muscles that pull the knees towards the chest.
During standard squats in gym class, you use both. The six pack lifts the shoulders off the ground and the hip flexors help bring the torso closer to the knees.
So there are two problems here: first, squats engage your abs and hip flexors, not just test your abs. It’s not exactly your problem; you can strengthen your abs and hip flexors at the same time. It just means that the test doesn’t check what it’s supposed to. But the second problem concerns you personally: your back may hurt.
How squats can hurt your back
Thus, squats engage your abs as well as your hip flexors. One of our hip flexors runs along the front of the thigh (it’s also a quadriceps), but there’s a lesser known group of muscles that could potentially cause some back pain while squatting.
This is a group of muscles known as the iliopsoas . These muscles connect the pelvis to the front of the lower spine. Or, in other words: in the squat, when your pelvis is relatively fixed, these muscles pull on your spine.
Now, normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. When you use your hip flexors to flex your hip in everyday life (or other exercises in the gym), you are also using other core muscles to strengthen your torso and stabilize your spine.
But in a high rep squat test , the goal is to complete as many reps as possible in a given time period. No prizes are given for a good stretch or for activating your abs more than your hip flexors; they are not easy to measure. You are only judged by the number of legal reps you complete. So your abs get tired, but you keep going. As your rectus abdominis fatigues, the hip flexors take on more and more work . This can cause back pain and possibly injury.
Why squats aren’t really a problem
So squats are bad, right? Well, it’s harder than that.
There is a study that I found cited in many places to back up the statistic that squats cause 56% of Army Fitness Test-related injuries. What the study actually found was a bit more complex. Yes, squats were more likely than the other components of the test (running and push-ups) to result in a soldier saying he had an injury. But almost all of these were minor “injuries” that did not affect their duties and did not require medical attention. (Reading between the lines, it seems that these were people who had back pain after the test, but recovered quickly.)
One of the notions about the dangers of squats is that repeated spinal flexion over the years is bad for you. But the authors of this study found no difference in injury rates between recruits and people who had been doing the squat test for years.
Injury rates were highest among soldiers who had previously been injured while preparing for the test, and among soldiers who had trained the least and scored the lowest on the test. This strongly suggests that you are more likely to get injured because of weakness, rather than that squats are destroying soldiers’ backs. The authors also cited previous research that found that soldiers with the lowest fitness test scores were twice as likely as their peers with higher scores to suffer back injuries in the line of duty.
No wonder people prepare for squats by doing a lot of squats. (The injury study done here found that people averaged about 300 squats a week in training.) If squats hurt your back when done at high reps, past the point of exhaustion, then the problem isn’t with any single squat— it’s a test and the thousands of fatigued reps you do while preparing for the test. So far, there is no evidence that you will hurt yourself by simply doing a few sets of squats as part of your regular workout.
How to do squats without back pain
These problems with squat tests have been known for many years. A number of alternatives were proposed in the 1990s. Some of them got hooked.
First, if we go back to World War II fitness tests, squats of the time were often done with legs straight on the ground. ( There is an illustration from an army manual here.) The bent-legged squat was one of the first modifications designed to make the test more focused on the abdominal muscles.
There was a wave of backlash against squats in the 1990s, and if you were at the time, you may remember that abs training changed from squats to crunches . This version of the crunch involved lying on your back with your knees bent and your hands behind your head. Instead of sitting down, you just had to flex six packs by lifting your head and upper shoulders off the floor. Done slowly and with control, this movement engages your abs with minimal hip flexor involvement.
A similar movement is the McGill twist . You have one knee bent and one knee straight, but otherwise everything is similar. Slowly, in a controlled manner, and paying attention to the lower spine to make sure it doesn’t arch too much. When the iliopsoas pulls on your spine, you get a big depression under your lower spine; This is why you are told to press your back against your arms or against a mat placed under your lower back.
Some of the military tests that use squats have changed how they perform them, but they are still very similar to squats. Someone holds your legs, knees bent, you start from a prone position on the ground, and each rep is completed when your arms crossed over your chest touch your hips. It is a modification of earlier squat styles from the 1990s and is referred to by some divisions of the service as “crunches” or “crunches”. But they are more like squats than standard crunches.
Recently, there has been a trend towards phasing out even these movements after the recognition (decades late, but hey) that they have the same problems as the old squat styles. The Army now uses the plank , as does the Navy , and the Marines are currently in the process of transitioning from twists to planks . (For now, recruits can choose what to do.) The Air Force offers your choice of plank, squat, or cross-legged crunches , which are a bit like bike crunches.
So, how do I work on the press?
So far, this has been the history of physical fitness tests. Gym classes and military fitness tests share the same challenges of having to evaluate hundreds of people quickly, with little to no equipment, and with clear evaluation criteria. They started with high repetition squat tests, changed the squats and eventually started replacing them with plank tests which meet the same scoring criteria and hopefully fewer complaints of lower back soreness. (However, if your back begins to sag during the plank test, don’t be surprised if you get back pain afterwards.)
None of this matters when it comes to our own training. Of course, you can do twists or twists if you like. But you can also do squats if you like. Squats are not a problem if you:
- Keep your core tight as you move
- Stop when your abs feel tired
- Stop if your back hurts
It’s also possible to hurt your back doing other exercises, so these are good rules to follow when doing crunches, planks, or anything else, including yard work and other moves you might do in your daily life. These tips will not only bring squats back into your repertoire, but will also allow you to perform squat variations such as Swiss ball squats, GHD squats, V-shaped squats, boat pose and more.
When you’re trying to build core strength (or aim for six packs for vanity – that’s all right, I hear you), remember that there are more exercises you can do than just laying on the ground with abs. . Heavy carries and grapples like farming carries are arguably one of the most functional ways to work your core. Exercises like squats, deadlifts, and deadlifts also engage your core. And don’t forget our comprehensive guide to designing a program that will work all your core muscles, with a wide range of exercises to choose from.