 Hello everybody, I'm Lance Goyki. Today we're talking about the single leg squat. So I'm trying to do all these internet videos and I, you know, with short sleeves on, sometimes you can tell that I work out. I don't really lift that heavy of weights very often. Maybe kinda heavy for normal people, but not that heavy for like really strong people. So one of the things that hopefully this video will do is it will redeem me. I want you to see a single leg squat, which is actually an exercise that I can do and hopefully you consider me a little bit more athletic after we do this. So a single leg squat. I have one foot down. I'm gonna, this is the pistol variation. I can set one foot up on a box and I could do it that way instead, but this is the pistol variation. This is like the full on. You don't need any equipment. This is the hardest variation to do. So as I come down, it's just like a normal squat. The forces are a little bit different because I'm on one leg and I gotta clear this knee up off the ground, this foot up off the ground. So one thing that I do to help my mobility is I reach forward because it shifts my weight back. It allows me to, I guess not, it doesn't demand quite as much ankle mobility from me. I'm gonna gas out if I just stay here on this leg. Okay, so this is what it looks like. Foot's up, arms are forward. We come on down like this. Same rules apply. I want my hip, my knee, my ankle in a straight line and I come back up just like that. You can load this just like any other variation. You can do it like a goblet squat where you're holding the weight in front. You could try to put weight on your back. I don't think you'll be able to do it. You could hold a kettle bell on a front rack position just like here up here. You could do two of them at the same time. All that stuff works. It's just really hard. You need a lot of mobility and you need to be able to control it so therefore you need this stability and as you load it, you need the strength to overcome those things, okay? Now you can, this is a really good training tool for like weightlifters, people who are really mobile, people who have really gotten good things out of doing snatches and cleans and full squats and stuff like that when they have demonstrated that they can control their bodies that way, this variation, this single leg squat variation works pretty well. Now how is it different from a bilateral squat? With two feet down, I have a wider base of support. With one foot down, I have a narrower base of support and so as you can see, I'm falling already. This stability demand is much more difficult than this. So I'm gonna be able to use more weight in a bilateral variation than with this single leg squat variation. What else is going on? So as I'm on one leg, I need different hip mechanics. So as I support myself, I need to be able to hike my opposite hip up and this other shoulder needs to come down a little bit and then I need to find something like the opposite when I'm here in the bottom and then I need to be able to get back out of it. All of those demands are very unique. If you've noticed that you can't do stuff like this, then maybe this variation isn't appropriate for you. Maybe you need something like more of a static thing, more of a lunge thing. So if I have trouble on this side hiking this opposite hip up high, I might wanna do something to help me find my left abdominals this way. Sink my left shoulder down toward my left hip, bring my left hip up toward my left shoulder, close this down, turn some ab muscles on and use this as a way to teach me how to do a single leg squat. One last funny story, I had a guy in for his first assessment one time. His goal, he told me at the end of the thing after I'd done all my things, right, was I wanna be able to do a single leg squat. And we had had a really good session and I knew that he had unlocked some of his mobility. He came in, he was obviously very strong. He had the strength to do it but he didn't have the mobility to stabilize himself and to find the right positions. And so I said, give it a shot. And so he did and he knocked it out and he was like, wow, I'm blown away that I can do that. This is amazing. This is a great session. And he never came back because he was done.