Opinion: Half Squats Are Better Than Full Squats (If You’re an Athlete)

When Thanos told Iron Man they were both “cursed with knowledge” in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, you probably didn’t think their exchange also applied to you. Most people’s fitness journeys — including my own — are long and windy. As we traverse that landscape, we discard old knowledge and adopt new ideas, usually to our benefit.

But knowledge can be a curse as much as it is a blessing: Take the half squat, a perfectly valid leg exercise that most people perform out of ignorance when they start lifting weights, then decry as ineffectual (or worse, embarrassing) after learning a bit more about the “science” part of exercise science. After all, training with a full range of motion is optimal, right?

Don’t get yourself all Dunning-Kruger’d. For bodybuilders, yeah, deep squatting is the right play most of the time. For athletes concerned more with their performance on the court than in a pair of posing trunks, half squats are a better use of often-very-limited time in the weight room.

Defining Half Squats & Full Squats

A paper from 2002 by Caterisano & colleagues, entitled “The Effect of Back Squat Depth on the EMG Activity of 4 Superficial Hip and Thigh Muscles,” (1) measured…you get the gist. The relevant bit concerns how the authors characterized the “partial,” “half,” and “full” back squats: 

• Partial (Quarter) Squat: 2.36 radians, or 135 degrees of knee flexion
• Half Squat: 1.57 radians, or 90 degrees of knee flexion
• Full Squat: .79 radians, or 45 degrees of knee flexion

A partial squat looks like the bottom of the dip phase of a vertical jump. Half squatting is sinking down until your shin and thigh form a perpendicular angle. The hallmark of a full squat is the hip crease being visibly below the kneecap, and sometimes the backside of the thighs in contact with the calves. 

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Why Half Squats Are Better for Athletes

More isn’t always more, especially when it comes to conventional strength training ideology. Remember, the leg exercises (or any other movement) you perform are tools you use in service of a goal. 

For powerlifters, the goal of squatting is to squat heavier. But a track athlete shouldn’t give a rat’s backside about their 1-rep max in the squat, nor should they fret over touching their hamstrings to their calves on every single rep. Why?

1. More Specificity to Sport

There’s a perpetual debate in the strength & conditioning community — a “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain,” scenario, if you will — about the merit of the SAID principle in athletic training. Personally, I think it’s a bit misappropriated when it comes to weight-room work for athletes, but we’ll get to that.

Partial squats (either half or quarter) are more relevant to sportsfolk because the joint angles during a partial squat appropriately reflect how athletes move on the court or field. You don’t see many basketballers, throwers, or swimmers in simultaneous end-range flexion of both the hips and knees, which are the defining features of a deep squat.

It stands to reason that an athlete will enjoy better carryover from their strength workouts to their sport if they mimic how they move on the field when they work out in the squat rack. (There’s a caveat here. We’ll get to it.)

2. Better Power Production

In 2016, Rhea et al. conducted a study with the specific goal of helping me write this article. How prescient of them. Rhea & Co. examined how squatting for the purposes of training a joint at an angle specific to the goal affected maximal power output. (2) They concluded:

• “Individuals in the quarter and full squat training groups improved significantly more at the specific depth at which they trained…”

That’s the SAID principle in action. You get better at what you repeatedly and specifically do; hardly a “eureka!” moment. But that’s not all they had to say.

• “Jump height and sprint speed improved in all groups … however, the quarter squat had the greatest transfer to both outcomes. Consistently including quarter squats … can result in greater improvements.” 

By “all groups,” the authors refer to the 28 “highly trained” athletes they sorted into three different groups, each of which performed quarter, half, or full squats. The athletes who omitted the bottom half of the squat performed better in the 40-yard dash and vertical jump tests at the conclusion of the 16-week protocol. 

3. Deep Squats Are Hard To Learn

Let’s pivot from the theoretical to the practical. Squatting is a skill, as is playing a sport well. Athletes don’t always have the time, resources, or bandwidth to master the art of squatting alongside other tasks. 

Take Olympic lifters, who spend hours each week dropping into and flying out of squats. Fluid, precise, and deep squatting is second nature to the weightlifter the way a hollow hold is to a gymnast.

It’s the same reason that variations of the Olympic lifts such as the power snatch are strength & conditioning staples, but you’ll almost never see a collegiate (or pro) athlete performing full snatches or cleans. Athletes need the violent, loaded hip extension Olympic lifting provides. The rest of those movements aren’t worth the time it takes to learn them. 

[Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Olympic Weightlifting]

4. Half Squats Accommodate Different Bodies 

Five-foot-eight Chinese weightlifter Tian Tao is built to squat. Latvian-born Kristaps Porziņģis, power forward for the Boston Celtics who stands at seven feet, two inches tall, sure as hell isn’t. To squat deep without looking like one of those rickety folding chairs from Sunday school, you usually need short legs, a long torso, and plenty of ankle mobility.

You can find these traits in wrestlers or gymnasts, but not in swimmers or kickboxers where long limbs are a plus. Half squats demand almost nothing of lower-body flexibility and don’t inherently penalize long-legged athletes. 

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The Case for Full Squats

In the interest of intellectual honesty, there are plenty of reasons for athletes to do the kind of squats that would make Tom Platz blush. Still, context is everything. 

They’re Better for Muscle Growth

The exercise science community is buoyant with glee about new research on long-length partial reps and muscle growth. (5)(6)(7) Applying mechanical tension to a muscle in its lengthened position seems to stimulate more hypertrophy than any other range.

Your quadriceps and glutes — the prime movers, squats are not a hamstring exercise — aren’t stretched during quarter or half squats. They’re in their mid-to-shortened ranges. 

Some studies have shown that partial and full-range-of-motion training elicit similar muscle growth, but squatting low and deep lets you generate a comparable muscle-building stimulus to a parallel squat. (8) You just don’t need to use as much external load. 

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Sport Specificity Isn’t King

Back to the SAID principle. Conventional athletic training best practices suggest that an athlete’s weight-room work should mimic and service their sport. That’s still more true than false, but the Overton window is shifting a bit, and for the better.

There’s a time for hyper-specific training; it’s called in-season practice. Athletes have no business learning new motor skills or messing with novel stimuli when they’ve got a match or game or whatever every few weeks.

The off-season is the best time to expose an athlete to challenges they don’t encounter on the court or field. Deep squats would be appropriate here, as would working with unfamiliar equipment or experimenting with new movement patterns.

Exposure to different dimensions of athleticism (in the form of non-specific exercises like deep squats) guarantees an athlete develops physical resilience and well-rounded fitness. 

Teaches Postural Control & Awareness

There’s also something to be said about the proprioceptive benefits of squatting ass-to-grass. Acute motor control and spatial awareness are fertile grounds worth harvesting for younger athletes. 

Put simply, youth athletics programs should contain opportunities for youngsters to learn how to control their bodies in space against mild-to-moderate, tolerably challenging resistance. There’s no better tool for that job than a full-depth, two-legged squat.

Your Game Plan

Knowledge is power, but your ability to contextualize things properly is what makes the learning process either a blessing or a curse. I’m glad that half squatting is largely considered a cardinal sin in the weight room, but that doesn’t mean half squats are meritless. Far from it. 

If you’re an athlete, hit the half squats hard and heavy. You’ll probably jump a bit higher and run a bit faster as a result. Do some deep squats here and there, especially in the off-season. To the crowd harping on about full-depth this and ass-to-grass-all-day that: Unless you’re a bodybuilder, cut the crap — the bottom half of the squat, I mean. 

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References

1. CATERISANO, ANTHONY; MOSS, RAYMOND E; PELLINGER, THOMAS K.; WOODRUFF, KATHERINE; LEWIS, VICTOR C.; BOOTH, WALTER; KHADRA, TARICK. The Effect of Back Squat Depth on the EMG Activity of 4 Superficial Hip and Thigh Muscles. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 16(3):p 428-432, August 2002.
2. Rhea, Matthew & Kenn, Joseph & Peterson, Mark & Massey, Drew & Simão, Roberto & Marín, Pedro & Favero, Mike & Cardozo, Diogo & Krein, Darren. (2016). Joint-Angle Specific Strength Adaptations Influence Improvements in Power in Highly Trained Athletes. Human Movement. 17. 10.1515/humo-2016-0006. 
3. Kirby, Tyler; McBride, Jeffrey M; Larkin, Tony R; Haines, Tracie L; Dayne, Andrea M; Roberts, Amanda R. Effect Of Squat Depth On Vertical Jump Performance Variables. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 24():p 1, January 2010.
4. Jarbas da Silva, Josinaldo & Schoenfeld, Brad & Marchetti, Priscyla & Pecoraro, Silvio & Greve, Julia & Marchetti, Paulo. (2017). Muscle Activation Differs Between Partial And Full Back Squat Exercise With External Load Equated. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 31. 1. 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001713. 
5. Pedrosa, G. F., Lima, F. V., Schoenfeld, B. J., Lacerda, L. T., Simões, M. G., Pereira, M. R., Diniz, R. C. R., & Chagas, M. H. (2022). Partial range of motion training elicits favorable improvements in muscular adaptations when carried out at long muscle lengths. European journal of sport science, 22(8), 1250–1260. 
6. Kassiano, W., Costa, B., Kunevaliki, G., Soares, D., Zacarias, G., Manske, I., Takaki, Y., Ruggiero, M. F., Stavinski, N., Francsuel, J., Tricoli, I., Carneiro, M. A. S., & Cyrino, E. S. (2023). Greater Gastrocnemius Muscle Hypertrophy After Partial Range of Motion Training Performed at Long Muscle Lengths. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 37(9), 1746–1753. 
7. Pedrosa, G. F., Simões, M. G., Figueiredo, M. O. C., Lacerda, L. T., Schoenfeld, B. J., Lima, F. V., Chagas, M. H., & Diniz, R. C. R. (2023). Training in the Initial Range of Motion Promotes Greater Muscle Adaptations Than at Final in the Arm Curl. Sports (Basel, Switzerland), 11(2), 39.
8. Schoenfeld BJ, Grgic J. Effects of range of motion on muscle development during resistance training interventions: A systematic review. SAGE Open Med. 2020 Jan 21;8:2050312120901559.
9. Weeks, C; Trevino, J; Blanchard, G; Kimpel, S. Effect of Squat Depth Training on Vertical Jump Performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 25():p S32-S33, March 2011.

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