Will Doing Squats Every Day Help Me Grow My Legs?

Squatting Every Day

Recently, there's been a pretty large trend in which lifters from different athletic backgrounds (bodybuilding, powerlifting, etc.) have tried squatting as frequently as seven days a week. The purpose of doing this is to basically enhance muscular development in the legs while getting stronger.

I know that a lot of you guys are probably wondering why squats are the exercise of choice instead of the deadlift or bench press. Technically - the squat is pretty much the king of all exercises. It requires a lot of core strength, stability, explosiveness - and engages a lot of muscle fibers.

The squat uses a lot of muscles in the human body which means that it takes a huge beating on the central nervous system. Squatting every day should -in theory- make the body adapt by becoming a lot stronger and improving its conditioning.

After seeing all the positive reviews - I decided to give it a go without having any expectations, whatsoever. In general, in was a pretty cool experience that I both loved and hated at the same time. Here's what I discovered after squatting every day for a couple of months.

Benefits

Let's start off with how I structured my week. To do this challenge I maintained my current training split and simply added a few sets of squats every day.

Monday: Legs & Biceps

Tuesday: Chest & Triceps

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday: Back

Friday: Shoulders

Saturday & Sunday: Rest

For the squat every day challenge I added five working sets of squats at the beginning of each workout. Since I always begin my leg workout with squats - I doubled my sets from five to ten on those particular days. Before my working sets I would do a couple of high-rep warm-ups with just the bar.

The first week was pretty hard as I'm not a big fan of squats - and that's putting it lightly. The second week is where I really began to see the benefits. Squatting became a lot of easier and I felt a lot more comfortable performing the exercise.

My strength took a huge jump and I was doing sets of twenty with weight that I previously struggled to do twelve reps. My deadlift and bench press also took huge jumps and I was pulling (and pushing) some pretty impressive numbers.

Downsides

As great as doing squats before my workouts was going - it soon began to take a number on me. Squats are known to take a huge toll on the central nervous system and mine wasn't the exception.

After a few weeks, I was stronger but my workouts began to feel unbearable. I wasn't enjoying my training and it honestly seemed like a chore. Although my cardiovascular conditioning got a lot better - it didn't count for much when I was falling asleep in-between sets.

I also began to experience slight knee pain and my lower back was constantly on fire. My shoulders were also hurting and cracking from all the pressure that came with squatting heavy weight every day.

Did My Legs Get Any Bigger?

I think that this is the question that everyone wants to know the answer too. I guess that it would seem logical that after squatting every day for two months would yield awesome results and my legs would get massive, right? Sadly, that wasn't the case.

My legs have always been a stronger body that respond very well to training. After squatting every day for approximately two months - I didn't add any noticeable size to them; I actually think that they even got a bit smaller.

Even though I was stronger and training more frequently - it did absolutely nothing towards hypertrophy. Once I stopped training this way and went back to squatting once a week - they went back to growing like they should've been.

Conclusion

Just because squatting every day didn't work for me, doesn't mean that it won't work for you. Like I said - it definitely helped me get stronger but it didn't do much for hypertrophy.

I'm a bodybuilder which means that my ultimate goal is to develop my physique. Weight training is a tool and not the end goal. If I were a powerlifter I would definitely use this training style to get my numbers up on the squat; otherwise it's just something cool to try.