Episode 8 | What Are The Push Up, Squat, And Daily Challenges Really Doing For Your Health? 

Hey everyone. My name is Dr. Chad Kuntz. I'm the founder and owner of Pr1me Movement. Welcome back to "Pr1me Time" with this episode number eight, where we're going to discuss what are these push-up, squat and daily challenges really doing for you and your health. So, I'm bringing this up because people are trying to get active, they're trying to get moving again, and a lot of people are on social media and they're trying to find something kinda catchy or jazzy or sexy to get them moving again. They might see this before and after of someone who did a squat challenge, who did let's say, 10,000 squats in a year and they go, "Wow, I wanna look like that."
 
Let's just have a little bit of a conversation and discussion about what these challenges are doing. For the purpose of this let me just discuss the squat challenge because that's quite common. So, in general, I still advocate movement. I still advocate for people getting out there and moving, and find that something that's good for them, but we also have to set the standard high as to, what are we really after? What are your goals and how can we best go after that?
 
So, if your goals really are a body compositional change, is only doing 50 squats a day for a year the best way to go after it? Now, we know squats are good whole body exercise, so at least it has that going for it, but let's break it down a little bit more. Let's say your goal is to do 50 squats a day for a year, okay. Understand that first, we need to make sure that your squat form is good. A lot of times people have been showing me this and their form is horrific. And so now you're turning a good exercise into a bad thing because you're repeatably doing such poor movement which is causing a lot of strain on parts of your body that you otherwise wouldn't have.
 
So let's say you are knee dominant and your knees go way too far past your toes and that's the way you squat, and you do that with that squat challenge because no one's assessed you. You continue on your squat challenge and all of a sudden after three weeks you're starting to have knee pain. You try to push through it, your knees get worse and then after two months, you say that didn't work for me. And then you aren't motivated to work out again and you thought that you were doing the right thing but it turns out you weren't.
 
So, one of the problems with these challenges, in general, is that they repeatably use one or two movements and they blast you with it for an extended period of time. A lot of times I'd see this for a year, that's usually the catchy number or the duration of time that I see. Well, that puts a ton of wear and tear and strain on specific parts of those tendons or whatever you're working the most and they don't ever get a rest break.
 
So, every good work out program should try to have some form of gradual progression over time, give you a chance to rejuvenate, to recover, and then after that increase something. Whether it's volume, whether it's intensity, whether you're manipulating your rest breaks, etc. And that should be going towards a goal in mind. So if you're using a squat challenge just to improve your body composition, there are much better ways of doing so. My point being is that a lot of people end up getting hurt when they do these things, they become unmotivated and it sets them back.
 
Instead, find someone that can help provide you with a work out program that's right for you at your point in time, to make sure that your form is proficient with everything that they've been giving you, whoever it is, and make sure that you can do that well, you understand how to do it and then go on your journey, okay? There are a lot of different rights and wrongs, I should say there are a lot of different right ways to go about it so you have to kinda keep an open mind. But there still is a continuum there, you can get outside those doors pretty quickly.
 
There are a lot of people trying to program people from afar and they've never even seen anyone move. So, I think there is a time and place for virtual training, but that person needs to be very careful that they're giving someone exercises that they can do proficiently that will be safe for them. And I see virtual training be done with these daily challenges of some form of or another. So, at the end of the day, be careful when you guys get going into these daily challenges, squat challenges, push-up challenges, and kinda think to yourself, "What makes me want to do that? What's really my end goal in mind? Is there a better way of doing this? Can I find someone who can help lead me to that goal better, safer, smarter?" Okay?
 
Guys, that's all the time we've got for "Pr1me Time." I thank you for tuning in. I look forward to talking to you guys soon. As always, feel free to e-mail me at chadk@pr1memovement.com. It was a pleasure. Thank you, guys.
 
 
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Episode 8 | What Are The Push Up, Squat, And Daily Challenges Really Doing For Your Health? www.pr1memovement.com 704.835.0831