TH: Sure.  I am the Director of the National Personal Training Institute of VA.  NPTI is a 500-hour, 6-12 month long school for personal trainers.  I’ve been devoted to fitness for the past 15 years, in college a collegiate All-American Powerlifter, and I’ve competed in several local strongman and armwrestling events.  I currently hold the USAPL VA state record for the deadlift of 700lbs at 198lbs.  I attended James Madison University where I got my degree in Kinesiology with minors in psychology and coaching.  I am lifetime drug free.

TGGO: OK, so I don’t feel intimidated or anything, now… Anyway, moving on.  In my article, I took issue with something you wrote on T-Nation, that “one legged squats (pistols as they are sometimes called) don’t do jack to increase maximal strength or muscle size”.  I probably didn’t make it clear in my article, which is my fault, but I don’t agree with you that pistols don’t increase maximal strength, if you allow that they can be externally loaded.  Was your point about pistols purely limited to unweighted movements or were you actually just thinking about muscle size, in which case, I completely agree with you?

TH: The short answer is that I don’t think that pistols of any sort, loaded or not, are very effective at increasing strength or size.  We seem to be in agreement on the later so let’s focus on the former.

First, my definition of a pistol or one legged squat is when somebody does a full squat with just one leg, the other leg is usually held out in front of them and it is not allowed to touch the ground.  Of course you can’t hold onto anything for it to count as a real pistol.

Also we need to define strength, as Supertraining tells us the expression of strength is very specific.  Of course if you want to define strong as being able to do a loaded pistol, then pistols are great.  But I am defining leg strength as one’s maximal back squat.  If you want to take coordination out of it we could define it as one’s maximal leg press although that is not as common of a definition, but using either of those definitions I don’t believe that pistols are very effective in increasing the 1RM on pretty much any bilateral leg exercise.  Could they help a little bit, sure, are the best choice, I don’t believe so.

I don’t hate pistols just to be clear.  My point in the article, which I may or may not have communicated well, was my goal was to have the athlete know why they are doing something.  Pistols do have value, but I believe their primary value is to develop hip, knee, and ankle mobility and flexibility.  So if you are looking for those things, then a pistol is a good exercise for you.  But if you are using the pistol to increase your 1 RM on squats or leg press (or increase leg size) then I think there are many better exercises to do. 

TGGO: Ah, I see.  So it’s the expression of leg strength bilaterally that you are focusing on.  Moving on to a more specific point, you have suggested that people who can do 5 good pistols often get buried with 275lbs on the bar in a back squat (and for the avoidance of doubt I am sure that this is true, especially if they’ve not back squatted before), but don’t you think this is more to do with lower back strength and stability than leg strength?

TH: My basic point is that I am guessing that there is a reasonably poor correlation to a person’s 1RM on the back squat and how many pistols they can do.  I don’t really think it is lower back strength or lack thereof, I just think it is a lack of overall total body/leg strength because a pistol doesn’t do a good job of developing that in my opinion.

Most people’s spines and lower backs should be able to support a 275 squat, as demonstrated by the fact that a 275 deadlift for a male would be moderately common even with basically no training, and that is primarily a lower back exercise although admittedly the ROM and load are different from a squat.

TGGO: My main disagreement with your article was the fact that you held up the idea of 5 good pistols as some sort of significant achievement in single-leg strength.  I don’t agree.  I think it’s a pretty basic level of leg strength and balance.  I would suggest that 5 good pistols with half-bodyweight is a significant achievement in single-leg strength.

So I suppose what I am saying is that if there are people out there who weigh 135lbs soaking wet who can do 5 good pistols with half-bodyweight and who still get buried under 275lbs (assuming their lower back was not the limiting factor), then I would have to agree with you that single-leg squats are poor for building maximal leg strength.  Are we still at cross purposes because I am talking about weighted single-leg squats and you are talking about unweighted single-leg squats or is there something else important here?    

TH: I can agree with you that 5 good pistols is not a great measure of pistol strength, but then again a 275 squat is pretty crappy as well.  So if you want to increase your standard to a half bodyweight pistol, which I would personally consider impressive and I haven’t seen too many people do, then I would say a 405 squat (or double bodyweight full ROM) is probably on equal footing.

And that is my basic point.  Seeing somebody be able to do a half bodyweight pistol is no guarantee of a double bodyweight squat, and most likely the correlation would be because the same person that spends a fair amount of time working on their pistol also does a reasonable amount of back squatting.  On the flip side, a 405 squat is not guarantee that the person is good at pistols.

I come from a powerlifting background and I can’t think of anybody that attributed a lot of their squatting prowess to doing pistols, and I can think of a lot of guys that can squat 400lbs, 500lbs or even 600lbs that would struggle doing just one pistol.  Clearly they have the strength to do it, but they don’t have the mobility/flexibility to it.

TGGO: And finally, getting away from the hair-splitting, is your main concern that pistols don’t really cause hypertrophy because of the limited spinal loading or am I completely missing the point?

TH: To me it is not about spinal loading, it is just about loading in general.  I would consider a half bodyweight pistol pretty rare and even that is only 300lbs of load assuming a 200lb person with 100 external lbs.  The same person could squat 400lbs (which would be 300lbs a leg including bodyweight) and achieve greater strength development and hypertrophy in my opinion.

My basic philosophy is that to increase maximal strength (as I defined it earlier) you want to choose exercises that allow for the greatest weight to be lifted and also require the most skill to lift.  These exercises will best build your strength in those exercises and the ability developed in those exercises will transfer over to other exercises.

For example if somebody can squat 400lbs with good ROM you know they have a pretty good leg press, good leg extension, good leg curl, are probably decent at lunges, decent at step ups, etc just from that one exercise.

I feel that a pistol meets the second half of that stipulation (it requires a lot of skill) but it doesn’t allow for a lot of load.  It does little good to become proficient at a high skill low load exercise and then expect that to transfer over to a high load exercise (regardless of the skill level necessary).

To summarize, I do feel that a pistol has a lot of benefits to offer, but it mainly from a mobility/flexibility/balance point of view, which certainly do have value and I think for general health of the lower body that is important.  Having said that, I often think they are oversold or claimed to be a near equal to the squat in terms of improving maximal leg strength or increasing leg size, and to those points I think the pistol comes up short.

My ultimate goal is not to bash any exercise, but instead get the lifter or athlete to know why they are performing that exercise.  All exercises have pros and cons to them, once you know those pros and cons then you can decide if that exercise should go in your program and why it is in there.

TGGO: Tim, thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to understand more about your experience in helping athletes develop leg strength.  I look forward to reading more of your articles in the future.

TH: I appreciate you being willing to debate this further.  One of my favorite quotes is “You can’t argue with results” so if things are working for you, by all means keep doing them.  But if they aren’t, then it is time to find out why and move on to something else.  Good luck with your training.

TGGO: Thanks, Tim.

At the moment

I have some concrete goals to see me through to Easter.  They are:

• a double-bodyweight pull up;
• a 2.5x bodyweight deadlift, probably 187.5kg (415lbs); and
• bench 100kg (220lbs).

Next steps

When I set those goals, I was already thinking about using them as a staging post for bigger and better lifts by the end of 2010.  So my goal list is probably going to start with additional milestones on these lifts, as follows:

• 115% bodyweight chin (somewhere around the world record);
• 3x bodyweight deadlift, probably 225kg (500lbs); and
• 1.5x bodyweight bench, probably 112.5kg

Other goals

There are other lifts that I have been working on in 2009 that I don’t want to let go to waste.

• Pistol: I pushed to get up to a half-bodyweight pistol a while back, lifting 36.25kg (80lbs) at 72.5kg (160lbs) bodyweight.  In 2010, I would like to take this up to 75% bodyweight, probably 56.25kg (124lbs) at 75kg (165lbs) bodyweight.  To support this goal, I have been doing a lot of work capacity lifting recently, around the 25kg – 30kg mark, so I feel confident of pushing up to 40 – 45kg in the near future.  Reaching the 50kg point could be a different ball-game, though.  I dislike doing max-effort lifting with pistols as I find it’s very easy to fall out of the groove and into a deadlift-type movement. 
• One-arm chin: this is actually a very different lift from the weighted two-arm chin or pull up.  I have only recently started training it as my elbows are quite small and easily pick up overuse injuries.  In fact, I may be one of the few people in the world who resisted the temptation to train assisted one-arm chins while training weighted chins at the same time.  Since I got to double-bodyweight before trying a one-arm chin, I have proved to myself that the ability to do a double-bodyweight chin doesn’t equate to one-arm chins.  There is a lot of technique involved.  The movement is also different.  The one-arm chin is more biceps intensive.  Despite that, I’ve quickly got to the point where I can do doubles with 15kg assistance.  I would like to get reps without assistance.
• Dip: I will probably try and match anything I do in the pull up and chin department with an equal lift on my dips.  Having said that, I have no particular love for the lift, it just stops me getting horribly unbalanced.  And I don’t seem to have to work that hard at it compared with other pressing exercises.  I reckon I can improve my dip about twice as fast as my bench, which given how poor my bench is, is quite amazing to me.
• Front Lever: I keep coming back to this skill but something is eluding me.  I am confident that I have the pulling strength and the abdominal strength to get completely horizontal but I can’t seem to get it together.  I would like to spend the necessary time to learn how to hold this position for a decent interval.  The problem is that it interferes with my other lifts terribly.  It drains my upper back for pull ups and chins, destabilises me for bench and weakens my abdominals for lower body lifts.  And recently, I’ve been too tired to fit it in at the end of my workouts.
• Overhead press: I’ve been really ignoring this lift for most of 2009.  When I first started training, my thoracic immobility prevented me from lifting overhead.  I could practically feel my shoulders grinding down to dust.  As I’ve improved my mobility and focussed on abdominal strength, I’ve regained the confidence to lift overhead again.  I have no real concrete numbers to aim for at the moment as I don’t really know what I’m capable of in this lift.  It might be nice to hit bodyweight for reps for the two-hand press but I have no concept yet of whether that is 6 weeks or 6 months worth of work.  I am in most regards an unusual case, owing to my large pull up and dip numbers but small powerlifting numbers.  I actually find one-hand pressing more fulfilling and fun so I may pick a goal on that front instead.  Who knows?

Wild card goals

I haven’t been working on these goals but the thought of them makes me smile, so here they are: 

• Captains of Crush Gripper number 2.5 – this is on my Christmas list, so I will end up playing around with it, whatever else I do in 2010.
• Orang-utan hold: I noticed recently that the world record for the orang-utan hold is 1:45s.  Red rag to a bull.
• Handstand push ups: they look cool.  Enough said.
• One-arm elbow lever: they also look cool and I need something to make me progress the basic elbow lever
• Tuck planche: I keep doing the frog stand when my nephews and nieces and friends’ kids come round and they’re getting bored of it.  I need something else in my repertoire and this could be it.

There really is so much to do and so little time!

Goat getting, a basic primer

It is said that one way to calm a racehorse down before a race is to put it in a pen with a goat.  If you want to upset your rival’s horse, then, you go and get their goat so their horse gets stressed and loses the race.  Hence the expression, “they really got my goat”, meaning “they have really annoyed me” (by stealing my goat).

I like the expression so I’ve started a new series.  “Don’t let them get your goat” will be about any and all articles that I have some issue with, either in part or in total.  I can’t promise I’ll leave any of your sacred cows unbarbecued but I’ll try to leave your goats untouched…

A goat  I saw in the Alps.

This week’s culprit

This week, the goat getter is Tim Henriques on T-Nation, writing about 5 Deadly Strength Errors.  He really got my goat because  he made some fairly misleading remarks about one-legged squats and pistols in the context of an otherwise quite sensible article.

And that brings me on to my next point.  I don’t like flame wars and taking big stands on issues just for the sake of it.  I’m not trying to suggest that everything Tim has said is wrong.  Quite the opposite, as a brief summary of his article will show…

5 Deadly Strength Errors, By Tim Henriques – a brief review

By my reading of his article, Tim suggests that you are erring if you:

• Listen to weak people – check
• Programme hop – check
• Don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing – check
• Don’t understand your body - check
• Don’t do enough negatives – hmm, not sure but OK

So, in principle, I agree with the key points of his article.  I nearly left it there but one statement really made me choke on my coffee.  What I struggled with was his description of pistols.  He made the following statement when he was talking about knowing what you’re doing (ironic, I know).

Tim says:

“…one legged squats (pistols as they are sometimes called) don’t do jack to increase maximal strength or muscle size; if you grow from doing them then you’d probably grow from doing almost any hard leg work. Why do we know this is true?  Because there are lots of people that weigh 135 pounds soaking wet that can do five good pistols, but if you were to ask them to get under the bar with 275 pounds on their back they’d get buried.”

OK.  Let’s back up.  I’m prepared to let the confusion about one-legged squats and pistols slide (they’re not the same thing whatever he thinks) because it’s not really that important.  People confuse these all the time.  Sometimes, they even confuse them with split squats.  But the point is that there is one leg driving the weight and one leg either hanging free or doing a supporting role.

What really gets my goat is that Tim presents the achievement of 5 good pistols as somehow relevant to the goal of building serious lower body strength.  Why 5 unweighted reps?  Why pick on unweighted pistols? 

If I said unweighted back squats were pointless for building leg strength, people would say “well, obviously”.  In fact, they’d probably look at me as if I were a bit daft.  So why is Tim’s statement taken any more seriously?

Athletes use weighted one-leg squats

If you look at Mike Boyle’s writings, he makes it clear that he is loading up his athletes with considerable weight when they’re doing rear-foot-elevated-split-squats and one-legged squats on a bench.

Mike is a big fan of single-leg training and I think he talks a lot of sense (so do some of T-Nation’s editors, by the way).  Mike’s main reason for having his athletes use the single-leg versions of squats is that he can build their leg strength while putting a lot less stress on the spine.  Because, in his considered opinion, the back gets injured a lot more frequently than the legs and you can train the legs more often than the back. 

The bottom line

I realise that there is a lot of noise being made at the moment about whether people should back squat at all.  I am not looking to add to that debate.  What I’m saying is that if you are going to compare apples with apples, then you can’t compare unweighted single-leg squats with weighted back squats.

But before I talk about that, let’s start at the beginning.

What is a pistol?

A pistol is a one-legged squat to the floor, with the other leg stretched out in front of you.  It challenges your strength, balance and flexibility, all at the same time.  You’ll know you’ve got it right if people ask you if you’ve taken up Cossack dancing.  It looks like this…

Is a pistol just a one-legged squat?

No.  Often, people use the term “pistol” interchangeably with the term “one-legged squat”.  But while a pistol is definitely a one-legged squat, a one-legged squat isn’t necessarily a pistol.  Hmm, I feel a Venn diagram coming on… Or maybe not.  You get the idea.

Some coaches have their athletes do one-legged squats from a bench, to take the flexibility issue for the non-working leg out of the equation.  These one-legged squats aren’t really pistols, as the name comes from the position that the body makes when at the bottom of the lift and the one-legged squat off a bench doesn’t form the pistol shape.

How do you do a pistol?

I am not going to give a pistol tutorial here as there are already plenty of good ones on the internet.  The best tutorials I have seen are:

• Beast Skills Pistol Tutorial – Jim goes through a number of techniques for learning the pistol.  I particularly like the door frame technique as it was the way I learned.  Did I mention that I want to be Jim when I grow up?
• Mike Mahler Stair-Step Approach to One-Legged Squats – Mike Mahler explains how to use a normal flight of stairs to learn the pistol.  Nice and simple.
• Steve Cotter’s Mastering the One-Legged Squat – Steve gives some useful guidelines on what to do if you have any pain or discomfort while doing pistols.  And we’d be wise to listen to Steve.  His name has a tendency of cropping up when people talk about pistols.

OK, I’ve mastered the pistol.  What’s next?

Add weight.  Use dumbbells, kettlebells, or plates.  I am currently languishing at around 30kg but hoping to hit half-bodyweight (c. 36kg) by the end of October.

When I add weight, I tend to use a 12″ box to stand on.  This helps me avoid stressing my lower back.  By using a box, I decrease the amount of lumbar flexion I undergo during the exercise, as my inactive leg gets to drop a bit lower.  It also makes it easier to hold the weights, as they don’t hit the floor.

You can see that I look a lot more comfortable on the box than on the ground!

How does that stack up?

Poorly.  Dragondoor runs a beast tamer challenge, which is regarded as quite a tough test that includes pistols and very few people achieve it.  I think there are 13 officially recorded successes to date.  The challenge is to lift a 48kg kettlebell in the following lifts:

• a pull-up
• a pistol
• a one-arm press

Of course, there could be lots of people who have achieved the 48kg pistol but struggle with the one-arm press and pull-up but I doubt it…

So who holds the world record?

I wish I knew for sure!  Happily, Adam is there to help.  Coming back to the Investments Series, Adam says “I think the best pistol squatter in the world is Steve Cotter, who is able to pistol two 32kg bells, and most impressively leap from the floor at bottom position to a table top with ease (video).”

Doing a bit of my own research, I found a reference on the Dragondoor forum to someone asking the same question who has the biggest pistol?  On that thread, the answer was also Steve Cotter, with 2 x 40kg kettlebells.  Whether that’s internet inflation or incremental improvement on the 2 x 32kg that Adam remembers, it is hard to say…

Double bodyweight pistol?

I am going to assume that Steve probably weighs at least 80kg, so the rough ball-park for the world record pistol is therefore around double bodyweight, which has a nice ring to it.  I can’t find any reference to this on Google, but if anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d be really interested to hear about it…

Please note though, I don’t know Adam from, uh, Adam, so I am not claiming any special insights here…

***

1. The Investments Series – Adam wrote a series of articles for Straight to the Bar in which he described the basic lifts that he believes are essential for any lifter, regardless of their goals.  It’s a great series that really makes you think about what you are trying to achieve with your lifting.

- Investments 1 – the Zercher Squat and Suitcase Deadlift

- Investments 2 – the Turkish Get Up and the Halo

- Investments 3 – the Jump Stretch Band Crush Lift

- Investments 4 – the Plate Curl and the Hot Potato

- Investments 5 – the RKC Arm Bar

- Investments 6 – the Hammer Curl, Pistol and Sandbag Bear Hug

Regular Garage Gym goers will be surprised by the lack of the competitive power-lifts: the standard (or sumo) deadlift, bench press and back squat.  Also conspicuous by their absence are the standard assistance lifts: rack pulls, good mornings, box squats, front squats, floor presses and board presses.  Fans of the Olympic lifts will note that there are no snatches, cleans, jerks or variants.

As a huge fan of bodyweight exercises, I am slightly put out by the lack of pull-ups and dips.   I concede that not everyone is designed to dip but I would definitely stick my chin out on the pull up.  Maybe one day I will do my own investments series.  But first, I need to invest a bit more!

After re-reading the series again prior to writing this post, I remembered a post on Mike The Machine Bruce where he describes a linear progression routine for added mass.  That routine was:

- Deadlifts 5 x 5

- Pull ups with weight 5 x 5

- Dips with weight 5 x 5

- Shrugs 5 x 5

- Swings 5 x 5

Leaving aside my thoughts on the details of Mike’s programme and with the caveat that Mike’s routine is couched as a mass-gainer and not an Investments in Strength routine, it is interesting to note his emphasis on bodyweight plus weight exercises over Adam’s more revolutionary choices.

2. Interviews by Josh Hanagarne – this blog post on World’s Strongest Librarian has links to all parts of Josh’s interview with Adam.  It also promises a review of Josh’s upcoming week of training with Adam, which will be compulsive reading for me and many others, I have no doubt.

3. My Thoughts on Strength – this article by Adam on Dragondoor is the best advocate of consistency, time and hard work that I have read.

4. Leverage lifts – this article is just brilliant.  I would add the shovel deadlift, Thor’s hammer, and the front lever and planche progressions to this great list of innovative exercises.  What’s more, they require very little equipment.  What more could a Garage Gym goer require?

5. Adam’s taste in music – a lot of people underestimate the importance of good training environment.  Music is a big part of that environment for me and Disturbed is undoubtedly the best music to listen to while you are hitting the iron hard.

Just writing this has inspired me to mess around with some leverage lifting (and I confess, I went downstairs and tried some plate curls halfway through a paragraph).  You’ll see the results in my next workout plan on Friday.  I hope you find Adam as motivating as I do…