Pistol Squat | Unlocking Series

Workouts 1 and 2:

Workout 1 - designed to initiate pistol squat training from the ground up.

Workout 2 - a more challenging routine for individuals nearing the achievement of a full pistol squat.

Warm-Up:

To properly warm up for the Pistol Squat, you simply need to warm up the muscles around the hips, knees, and ankle joints by moving them around with intent or doing some named mobility movements. Then, do some warm-up sets for the main exercise. For example:

Light Mobility Drill: Hip Circles -> Standing Hip Openers -> Knee Circles -> Ankle Circles for a round or two with enough reps for you to feel them working.

Warm-Up Set/s: You can either do your main exercises or do some other relatively easy core exercise and do some reps or duration far from failure to use and warm up the same muscle groups.

Just make sure that whatever you do is just enough to work and warm up your muscles, not tire them, so you can perform your best in your working sets.

Pistol Squat Variation Selection:

Choose a lower-body exercise that has a similar movement pattern to that of the Pistol Squat that you can do near failure within the specified rep range. These can be lower-body exercises like Bodyweight Squats and Bodyweight Lunges.

You simply have to choose or modify an exercise for you to be able to do that within the specified rep range to build both strength and muscle mass on the main muscle groups involved.

Accessories:

Determine what your limiting factors are in your Pistol Squat training, and then choose exercises for those limitations. These typically include single-leg balancing, hip flexion strength for the extended leg, and lagging muscle groups like the quadriceps and gluteal muscles.

Proximity to Failure:

This routine is strength-specific for achieving your first Pistol Squat hold, so managing fatigue is highly important to get a reasonably high frequency of training for it. While limiting your proximity to failure in like 1 - 2 RIR is better, it's still good to go until task failure (0 RIR), considering you likely won't know what that feels like just yet, to avoid undertraining.

With this, you should compensate for it by ensuring other training variables are optimized for recovery, like nutrition, sleep, stress management, and overall training volume. But then, after getting the hang of the feeling of going until failure, it's better to stay in 1 - 2 RIR and use going until failure sparingly.

Training Frequency:

For strength training, it's best to limit fatigue as much as possible so you can get a relatively high training frequency. It can be every other day or 2-3 times a week. This makes it possible for you to get in as much practice as possible to maximize neural and physiological (structural) adaptations.

Progression:

There's not much to do aside from building size and strength by simply doing bodyweight squats and increasingly adjusting to single-leg squats like assisted pistol squats while addressing other limitations until you're finally able to do unassisted pistol squats. It is as straightforward as that. You simply need consistency and to make sure that you are properly doing everything in the training session and be able to fully recover every training session.