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leg pistol

Difficulty: Advanced

Want to build strong sculpted legs while enhancing your athletic potential? Try out the ring assisted pistol squats that fit almost any ability level. Grab a ring and get to work.

How to

  1.  Grab your set of rings and walk the feet back beyond the rings.
  2.  Lift one foot off the floor and straighten the leg out in front.
  3. Keeping the shoulders back and hips square, slowly lower onto the supporting leg aiming to get to a depth where the thigh is parallel to the floor.
  4. Press thru the mid-foot and pull yourself as little as possible with the ring supports to the starting position.
  5. Perform all repetitions on one leg before training the other.

Guide

This one-legged exercise targets the quads, glutes, and hamstrings directly, while indirectly training core stability and balance.

By lifting one of the legs, and unstable demand is placed on the hip of the working (squatting) leg. This requires lots of coordination and balance between the muscle surrounding the joint.
At the same time the unstable nature encourages greater core strength. The benefit is balanced muscular development which not only looks better but helps promote better performance for most sports involving running cutting or jumping; not to mention making daily activities easier.

The great thing about this exercise is it is a simpler version of the unsupported pistol squat making it easy for anyone to implement into their program.

Advanced Leg Pistol

To increase the difficulty of the single leg squat you can add additional resistance to the exercise with a weighted vest, weighted bar, or dumbbells. As always, with strength training exercises add additional resistance incrementally for safe and continuous progressions.