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.

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.