Thursday, September 5, 2013

30 Days of Squat (Day Five) - Pistols

Squat Rx #25 - Pistols

I had been meaning to make a video about pistols for a very long time, but there was a period of (literally) years that I had not been doing them at all. Pistols are one of those exercises that can be a little intimidating if you weigh much more than a buck fifty, so they just kind of fell out of the rotation and never made it back in... until recently. 

Lately, the hips and lower back have been a bit of an issue and I decided to give them a shot. After a couple of sessions of grooving the movement with concentric-only pistols, they came back without too much trouble.

Pistols are one of those exercises I don't recommend for everyone, but it's a fun challenge and might be just the thing a trainee needs to inject new life into their training rotation. Although the thoughts presented here may be common sense, I hope they are helpful to some.

6 comments:

Petr said...

Boris, pistols should be done with arms on your hips not in front of you :). try it

Boris said...

I'll give it a shot probably tonight Petr. Is there a reason why it's "better"?

Petr said...

Well, first it's much harder. Much harder. Second I had a talk with very experienced guy from tai-chi. He said that right way to do it (and only right way) from health perspective is with arms close to your boy or hips or chest or so and that tai chi people do this form of one leg squat because of that - health difference (knee versus hip).
Because it would force you to 'sink' into hips, to realy use hips capsule for the movement. At least one have another variation to work on :)

Petr said...

Also he had shown us another variations of the same, leg besides another, "coiled" in front of standing leg, behind standing leg etc.
So pistol is, I guess, pistol, but there are many interesting variations and aspects out there.
So far nobody who is able to do pistol with arms in front of the body (to counter balance) was not able to do pistol with arms on hips.

Boris said...

I tried it last night Petr. Couldn't do it. I'll keep at it though.

Petr said...

Yep, it's tough.