How Often Should You Squat In A Week (For Best Results)

Today we’ll limit our conversation of how often we should squat to between 1 to 4 days a week. We can squat every day. In my mind, there’s only one reason we’d want to do this, and that’d be to improve squat efficiency and technique. But there are programs out there designed to rapidly increase your strength that involve squatting every day or nearly daily. Because of this, I want to look at squatting every day in a separate video.

Let’s start with 3 or 4 days a week. What first comes to mind with 3 times a week is full-body workouts; your volume isn’t that high on any individual body part, and you might be doing 3 or 4 sets of squats for 9 to 12 sets a week. This would be good for a beginner. Someone new to training could make progress with even less volume than this.

Intensity needs to be factored in as the closer you train to failure and the more sets you do to technical failure, the more time you’ll need for recovery between training sessions.

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The advantage of doing 12 sets over 3 workouts as opposed to doing them all in one training session once a week is cumulative fatigue; by that 12th set, you’re going to be tired out from the previous sets, and you won’t be able to lift as heavy as you would’ve if you split them up over 3 days and instead of only 3 minutes rest between each set in one session. You have 48hrs rest between sets 4 and 5 and sets 8 and 9.

Studies have shown when training volume is matched; training frequency doesn’t matter. But what does matter is recovery. You need to allow enough time to recover from your last training session. But there’s no advantage to allowing an excessive amount of recovery time between sessions either.

Squats are very demanding and work multiple muscles, including the low back. I find my back tends to recover slower than the rest of my body. Making the amount of work my low back is doing a consideration on how frequently I can squat and the variations I choose.

We don’t always have to do a heavy back squat. For example, a split squat or Bulgarian split squat allows us to train each leg unilaterally with less weight reducing the load on our back.

So how would we use a fourth day? We should generally allow 48 to 72 hours for recovery between training sessions so that a fourth training day would be within this time frame.

This should be a technique day where we train light and focus on improving the movement. When lifting heavy, we tend to pick up bad habits. One of mine is I’ll shift my weight slightly over my stronger leg.

Another common mistake is not going low enough. By using lightweight or even no weight, you remove the fear of injury, allowing you to focus on the range of motion and really get to know how low you can safely go without compromising your form.

A technique day helps us improve the movement pattern without the stress of moving heavy weights. The more frequently we practice squatting, the better we get.

If I were training Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I’d have my technique day on Saturday, so I’ll have a full day's rest on Sunday before starting again on Monday.

For a beginner, training full body workouts 3 times a week is ultimate, but you can make progress with just twice a week. As a more experienced lifter, you will need more volume, which can be achieved by splitting up your training into separate upper and lower body workouts with 2 lower body sessions a week, doing your upper body on different days. Splitting them in half allows more energy to be focused on leg training.

Say you have a lower body workout with 18 total sets, 11 of those being squats and squat variations. The rest are for hamstrings and calves. Making 22 sets a week, almost double what you did for legs when training 3 times a week with more recovery time between training sessions.