Squatting

[Clueless]

I'm currently doing some squatting each day as I have thick thighs and cankles and a little which is mainly from bloating but I'm solving that by changing foods and drinking herbal teas. But apart from that I'm a slender person, just awkwardly shaped.
I live in a small house and the weather outside is terrible all the time so squatting is one of the only leg exercises I can do inside without causing the house to shake :/ (wooden house and you can feel anyone walking around).
knees aren't the best so I do need to be careful about how much strain I put on legs, but I've managed to get through 50+ squats the past 3 days, doing them in sets of 10-20 throughout the day though as legs have been sore since the first day.
question is; by breaking up squats in sets throughout the day, will they still be effective?
How many should I aim to do each day? It's not even midday and I've managed 50 so far, and I aim to do sets of 10 or so whenever I'm passing through room or the bathroom.
And I've also read that I should be resting in between days or else the squats are pointless? How often should I rest? And should I just try and do push-ups, etc to work out arms in between those days?
Are there any indoor workouts that I can also do to target legs and ankles? Though I do understand you can't really target parts of your body with most things.
How long should it take to see results?
Thank-you for any help!

[Boss Man]

Hi Clueless, good to speak to you, although to the unobservant it might look as if I've just insulted you.

Squats are not pointless no, but you do need to have rest days as consecutive days aren't great.

I would suggest you do 2-3 sets of 10, 3x a week on alternate days, but you do the sets with 60-90 second rest breaks in between, not a few hours between.

You need however an opposing exercise for the hamstrings to avoid becoming what is known as "quad dominant", as that could cause issues where one muscle group is much stronger than the other, affecting how you walk and potentially causing discomfort and possibly pain.

You could try doing lunges, but if you have any issues arising with the knees doing this, then stop if it causes pain and / or discomfort.

You could then do lying hamstring curls instead which are body weighted, as the squats you are doing are I would assume.

You'll probably be able to find online videos or google images to demonstrate this for you.

[Clueless]

Thank-you for responding Boss Man, I some how got blocked from the site for the past couple of days so couldn't respond sooner!
After stopping at 100, I took a rest day yesterday and just wanted to sleep all day! So I'm not sure wether body is some how exhausted or whether I may be getting sick, but I've also just woken up from a random nap!
Hopefully I have enough energy this afternoon to get through a decent amount.

I will definitely see how knees go with lunges, I think the running causes more pain because it's sudden weight on knees, where as squats, and hopefully lunges are more of a slow amount of pressure on them, if that makes any sense?
And I will look into the hamstring curls as well!
Thank-you for your help!

[Boss Man]

Hopefully this works for you but definitely a more controlled approach with squats like I suggested, is better than doing loads of them all day every day in split quantities as that's not allowing adequate rest and could have been overdoing it on weekly quantity as well.