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.