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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

lifting weights can distort the natural balance of muscles and ligaments around the body and can create strain-/break-points as well.

Sounds like total cruft to me sorry. How would a full body exercise like a barbell squat do all of this ?

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Barbell squats work some muscles more than others. If you do a lot more squats than opposing exercise, you will create imbalanced muscle strength over time.

Of course if you run a careful program, you can make sure to work opposing muscle groups equally and avoid this. But the fact is that a lot of people who lift weights don’t run careful programs.

Another factor is the elasticity of your muscles. If you don’t up your stretching efforts as you up your lifting, you risk trading range of movement for strength. Again—totally manageable but that doesn’t mean everyone does it.

What would be the natural, opposing movement of a barbell squat? Doing force in the inverse? That's a completely unnatural movement pattern. Standing up and carrying weight is about the most common denominator in human movement.

If you break down the muscles involved, it’s not bad. Squats are quad, glute, and back dominant, so you would balance with exercises focused on hamstrings, hip flexors, and abs. Also, tons of stretching.

If executed properly, is a deep squat itself not a form of stretching?

A well executed squat uses hamstrings and abs a ton, unless you believe you don't need to have completely tight abs when squatting 1.5x your bodyweight.

What are you arguing? That a barbell squat works every muscle in the body equally? Do you actually believe that is true?

I'm arguing that there is no such thing as an "opposing" exercise. Squats, deadlifts, lunges, cald raises, you can compliment with some things but a leg program that's 80% squats and deads is going to be very good.

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