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.

What climbing kit do I need?

There are a few pieces of essential kit.  For me, these are:

• a few carabiners – these link everything together, like robust safety pins
• a few slings – you attach your weight plates together using these
• a harness – you attach slings with weights to yourself with this
• a pulley – this is great for taking weight off rather than adding it on

Apart from the harness, which set me back about £40, you should be able to pick up most of these for a couple of quid each, depending on the brands you choose.

What exercises can I do?

There is so much you can do and so much that climbing kit can help you with.  If you start with a basic full body programme, it might look something like this:

• Weighted pull-up or chin
• Weighted dip
• Weighted pistol
• Assisted glute-ham raise

Climbing kit can help you with each of these exercises.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg!  You can also use it to help with:

• hanging leg raises
• assisted one-arm pull ups
• rope upright rows
• seated cable rows
• face pulls

I’ll look at these latter five exercises another time but for the time being, here are the basics…

Weighted pull-ups

I could bore for England on the subject of weighted pull-ups but in brief:

• Put the harness on
• Loop the sling through some weights plates and connect the ends with a carabiner
• Attach the carabiner to the harness
• Do a pull-up off your pull-up bar

If you can get to the point where you are putting a weight roughly equal to your 2/3 your bodyweight on the harness, you’ll find that you may start to feel that the weight is pulling your lower back into lordosis.  You can get around this by using a harness with belt loops and using one of the belt loops at the back to hang about 15 – 20% of the weight.

If you can hang your bodyweight off the harness and do a good, clean chin or pull up, I’d be interested to compare notes as to how you got there to see whether it was similar to my journey.

Weighted dip

For the weighted dip, you basically follow exactly the same routine as for pull-ups but using your “dip station” instead of the pull-up bar.  I use inverted commas around “dip station” because I keep meaning to sort a proper one out.   I have been using the bar on my squat rack plus a kitchen stool for 3 years now and I’ve got up to a bodyweight dip with that set-up.

Weighted pistol

I hate holding dumbbells when I do pistols.  I don’t know why but I prefer to use 10kg (22lb) plates in my hands and then strap whatever extra weight I need to my upper body with a couple of slings and carabiners.  As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to do my pistols off a 12″ box for the following reasons:

• the inactive leg can hang down a bit, which decreases the amount of rounding that my lower back does and therefore reduces the stress
• I can hold weights where I like and not hit the ground with them
• I can balance more easily

If you look carefully, you can see a blue sling hanging over my back with a carabiner.  Then there is a 2.5kg weight hanging down behind me.  When I stand up, it looks like this.

Assisted glute-ham raises

With your pulley, a sling, two carabiners and a bit of gear cord, you can create a glute-ham raise.  I’ve written about this in detail before but I’ll cover it again here for completeness.  As well as your shiny new climbing kit, you will need a spare pull-up bar to hook your feet under and a pad to protect the backs of your ankles.  It looks like this:

Close up, the pulley system looks like this. 

The pulley itself is attached to a carabiner.  The carabiner is attached to the pull up bar using a short length of gear cord.  I have probably tied off the cord is with an overhand knot but really you should use a double fisherman’s if you have the length for it.  You should also leave a longer tail than I have left.  You really don’t want your assistance weight crashing down on your undefended feet as they lie pinned underneath the other pull up bar.

The cord on the pulley is then run through and tied off in a loop, again using an overhand knot on a bight.  But again, you should probably use a figure-of-eight knot on a bight for added security.  The bight is then clipped into another wiregate carabiner.  The weight plates are then looped onto a sling and clipped together with a third carabiner.

Wrapping up

Well that’s four basic exercises, a pull, a push, a lower quad-dominant and a lower-ham dominant that only require a few bits of climbing kit and some ingenuity.  If you find some small inspiration here, I’m glad.  If you have any other ideas to share, I’d be delighted to hear them.