Are Hindu Squats Bad for Your Knees?

The bethak breaks the only squat rule most people can name.

Heels come off the floor. Knees travel well past the toes. The arms swing. It is the exact position a trainer would stop you mid-rep to correct, and wrestlers in the akharas of colonial India are described as doing it in the hundreds daily, for decades.

Search for whether that is bad for your knees and you will find confident answers in both directions. Almost all of them are citing research that did not study this movement.

The rule is older than the study everyone cites

The instruction to keep your knees behind your toes traces back to biomechanics work from the 1970s that linked forward knee displacement to greater shear at the knee, work a 2023 review traces to Ariel in 1974 and McLaughlin and colleagues in 1977 and 1978. It had spread through coaching for decades before the paper now used to argue about it was ever published.

That paper is Fry, Smith and Schilling (2003), and it is worth reading properly, because both camps misuse it.

Seven weight-trained men did parallel barbell squats loaded to their own bodyweight, twice: once normally, once with a wooden barrier physically blocking the knees from moving forward. Blocking the knees cut knee torque by about 22 percent. It also forced the men to lean further forward, and hip torque went up by a large multiple.

Look at the hip figure in the top row. The standard deviation is more than twice the mean, and there were seven men. Put those two facts together and the interval around that mean comfortably includes zero. The widely quoted "tenfold increase in hip torque" is a ratio whose denominator the study could not tell apart from noise. A later group ran the same restricted versus unrestricted comparison and did not observe the tenfold rise in their own data, on five subjects.

The direction of the finding looks real. The size of it should not be quoted to two significant figures by anyone.

The study's own conclusion was that restricting the knees likely transfers force inappropriately to the hips and the low back, and that appropriate joint loading may actually require the knees to travel slightly past the toes. It is regularly cited in support of the rule it argued against.

What the deep squat evidence actually covers

A 2024 scoping review in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living gathered fifteen studies on the deep squat and knee joint structures. Fourteen found no negative impact on knee joint health. The one that raised concern was a single case report which the reviewers note lacks evidence of a causal relationship. They also report that cartilage appears to adapt to the loading by thickening, potentially offering the joint more protection rather than less (Rojas-Jaramillo et al., 2024).

Their conclusion, with the hedge they wrote and most people drop: the deep squat appears to be safe for knee joint health and could be included in training without risk, provided proper technique is maintained.

Now the limits, because they matter more than the headline. Six of those fifteen were themselves reviews and one was the case report, which leaves eight primary studies. They ran from weeks out to three years, in students, navy cadets, soldiers and college athletes doing loaded barbell squats. Knee pathology was an exclusion criterion. Nobody in that literature was doing several hundred unloaded reps a day for twenty years.

The bethak is a different movement, and it cuts both ways

In its favour: there is no external load. The forces at your knee come from your own mass and your own muscle rather than from a bar, which is a fraction of what a loaded barbell squat imposes.

Also in its favour: at the very bottom, the back of the thigh meets the calf. That contact has been measured at close to half of bodyweight in deep squatting, and it carries force that would otherwise pass through the joint (Glitsch et al., 2022). Those measurements come from held positions rather than fast repetitions, so read it as a reason depth is not automatically the dangerous part, not as a guarantee.

Against it: the raised heel is not the protective feature it is often claimed to be. Lu and colleagues tested 1.5 cm and 3 cm heel lifts against flat, in ten men and ten women doing barbell back squats. In the men, the taller lift raised peak knee extension moment and quadriceps activation, and shifted the share of joint work away from the hip and toward the ankle. Hip joint moment itself did not change, and none of it reached significance in the women (Lu et al., 2022). A bethak raises the heel far past three centimetres, so applying that result here is itself an extrapolation. What it supports is a direction and not a magnitude: lifting the heel moves work toward the knee. In a bethak that is arguably the point, since it is a knee-dominant exercise by design, but it is not a safety argument.

Unknown: the rep counts. No study has looked at what hundreds of daily repetitions do over years. That is the actual question, and the honest answer is that nobody has measured it.

What the akhara record is worth

The anthropologist Joseph Alter reports the wrestler Gama, in the conventional phrasing of the tradition, at three thousand bethaks a day in his mid-teens, five thousand by 1908, and six thousand at the age of fifty (Iron Game History, 1995). We have written separately about why those figures are a convention rather than a count.

Be careful what you do with it. The men whose knees failed did not get biographies, so the record cannot tell you the practice was safe. It is the survivors talking, and Gama is the most extreme outlier the tradition produced, which makes him the worst possible evidence for an ordinary knee.

What it does establish is narrower and still useful: this was ordinary, sustained, everyday practice rather than a stunt, in a setting where people were supervised and built up over years.

Where to actually be careful

If your knees are not healthy, this is not your exercise to experiment with. Current knee pain, a patellofemoral diagnosis, a previous meniscus or ligament injury, or anything in rehab puts you outside every study cited here. That is a conversation for a clinician.

Balance is the real beginner risk, not cartilage. With the heels raised your base shrinks to the forefoot, and the standard failure is falling backwards at the bottom, which is the worst place to lose it. Hold a doorframe or a strap for your first sessions, and do them somewhere you would not mind losing your balance.

Build depth before volume, and build both slowly. Start at a comfortable range and a set of ten to twenty, then add over weeks rather than over sessions. Full depth and high reps on day one, on an untrained knee, is exactly the kind of extrapolation this article is warning about. The akhara numbers were built across a decade, and the volume is the part of this with no evidence behind it at all.

Stop on control, not on burn. Knees drifting inward, dropping into the bottom instead of lowering, and rebounding off the end range are what hurt people, and all three arrive with fatigue.

How to do one

1. Feet about hip width, weight across the whole foot to start.
2. Swing the arms back as you descend, letting the heels rise and the knees travel forward.
3. Lower under control to your current range. No drop, no bounce out of the bottom.
4. Swing the arms forward as you stand, replanting the heels at the top.
5. Find a rhythm, but own the last few degrees at the bottom. Breathe with the tempo rather than holding your breath.

Knees track over the middle toes throughout. If they drift inward, the set is over. The arm swing adds momentum, so the faster you cycle, the more of it your knees have to absorb at the bottom. Speed is something you earn.

The honest answer

Are hindu squats bad for your knees? For a healthy knee, with control, built up gradually, there is no good evidence that they are, and reasonable evidence that deep knee flexion is better tolerated than a generation of coaching assumed. There is also no evidence at all about doing thousands of them, and anyone who tells you otherwise is extrapolating from barbell studies that ran a few weeks.

The akhara model itself is the more useful takeaway. Legs trained with bodyweight through full range, daily. Loading that bodyweight cannot supply coming from objects instead: Alter lists a typical akhara as an earthen pit, a hard packed floor for exercises, and a collection of mugdals, gadas and nals: clubs and maces to be swung, stone weights to be lifted. If you want the mechanics of why a swung implement loads you so differently from a dumbbell, we worked through it in a separate piece.

Tagda Raho sells the clubs and maces linked above. This article is general information and not medical advice. If you have knee pain or a history of knee injury, speak to a qualified clinician before adding deep squatting to your training.