With spring approaching, nature wakes up along with the first warm sun rays playing peek-a-boo through the clouds. Sun light means pure energy and naturally our bodies (as much as our minds) leave the winter state of hibernation and slow pace.
That serious energy boost makes us more proactive in all walks of life, but combined with the expected summer flesh revealing fashion tendencies and the “get your beach body” propaganda, it naturally makes us more self-conscious and fitness oriented.
It is a well known fact, that squats and plunges are among the best exercises when one wants to sport toned legs and gluts this and, actually, any other season. And according to the statistics, the use of squat is gradually increasing in the new millennium and this fact certainly has to do with the fitness boom.
A squat has actually been a typical position for our ancestors for thousands of years, and though the Western world found the comfort of other ones, squatting is still common in many other parts of the world as a waiting or relaxing position or a typical one to enjoy a meal and ironically, there people seem to have fewer problems with back pain and discomfort.
The noun squat has several meanings in the English language. With the earliest recorded use in the now dialectic meaning of a heavy fall or bump, coming from the 1350s romance Ipomedon, published by Eugen Kölbing.
The word squat, itself, entered the English language from the Old French esquatir, with the meaning of “compress, press down, crush”, which derives from the Latin coactus, past participle of cogere “to compel, curdle, collect”.
Nowadays squat has two principal meanings. The first one in the sense of crouching or sitting down close to the ground, that is now a popular fitness and sports term. Its use is dated from the 15th century onwards to firstly describe the squatting actions of animals, in particular those of hare, and as such to firstly appear in print in 1580, in John Lyly’s Euphues and his England, where exploring the country, a hunt of two hares is described: “One run so fast you will never catch him, the other is so at the squat, you can never find him.”
By 1880s, the term squat generally replaced the crouch to name the squatting posture used in gymnastics and weight lifting.
The other main use of the word squat, is in the meaning of the illegal occupation of an uninhabited building especially by a group of homeless people, known as squatters. The use of squatter is recorded from 1788 – a settler, who occupies land without legal permission.
Ironically, the phrase hot squat, which naturally brings images of good looking people squatting provocatively, is used in the American slang to name an electric chair (the last and best-fitting chair that a criminal might sit in) since the 1890s. As, for example, the pulp writer Joseph Allan Dunn wrote in 1930: “If he used a revolver and was nabbed, it meant the Hot Squat.”
