 First question is from Catherine health journey What is the best way to progress to a full unassisted pistol squad? Well, okay, assuming you can already do You know two-legged squats with good form and you're strong And you could do barbell squats the next in my opinion best way to do this to exercise I really like one is a one-legged get up off of a bench So you sit on a bench you have your legs bent maybe one leg is straight And use one leg to predominantly lift yourself up to kind of practice that single leg lift up and then the second one is just stand on a box and With one leg off the box and squat down slowly and come back out and progress yourself to be getting lower and lower There's two things that I love to use and it depends on if you have a steep enough incline of stairs But you know it actually like acts as a natural kind of progression To be able to get up off the stairs So if you sit like a bit higher, oh, yeah, and you lift you lift your leg up and you can start a bit higher You start there now gradually like go to the next step sit on that step come back up and kind of work your way down the stairs or you know the the more obvious one if you have suspension trainer straps is to kind of hold on and to gradually Sorry, basically like training wheels So you're you're lifting your leg up and you're squatting down to the depth that you you know can control comfortably and drive back up and sort of gradually get rid of You know the suspension trainer to help to pull you back up Yeah, I love the suspension trainer or what you said the only thing that I would I would say that when you're doing this is When people are trying to learn how to do a pistol squat They they get so hung up on being able to say I did a pistol squat versus like really paying attention to the form the mechanics Right, it becomes a one-legged anyhow Yeah, and they kind of you know kind of roll and that into it Yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose I would rather see this so if we were gonna do the the one-legged get up like you said I would take clients and I would put like remember those those blue blue foam pads right and you make the bench higher Yeah, so I'd start I'd have I'd have a bench and then I'd stack one or two or however many I think to Because I could do that I did this with clients that were 80 years old So I would do it with anybody even in advanced age This is a great exercise and you just by regressing it or you add pads to regress the exercise So I'd start really high and I would emphasize the the form right and sometimes I would I would let clients like even hold on to My fingers right and say, you know, you can hold on here. I want you to keep the chest up slowly come down I don't want you leaning forward to get up and I want to see like this perfect One-legged squat even if it's a very short range of motion And then I get rid of one pad and then we work on that till we get perfect form And then we get rid of that pad and then you're down and you work your way down that way until you get to Like a pistol squat if you have Suspension trainer you can start all the way at the bottom and then you actually have some arms The only thing that I say it caution you is that you know Don't try and do a pistol squat and completely throw out the mechanics of it Just so you can get a pistol squad out because then you lose a lot of the really good benefits of getting Doing a single-legged squat. I also wanted to highlight one thing too that like in terms of like ankle stability in mobility To address making sure like and so this is the whole knees over toe kind of a mentality where you know You are gonna be in a position where your knees gonna travel quite significantly further in order to counterbalance great point You into that position a lot of people can't handle that kind of stress around the knee initially So to be able to work on that and focus on like a combat stretch and really kind of gradually increase that Range so your knee travels a bit forward and be able to have that Comfortable feel to be able to keep your heel down and and tracking to keep you stable is gonna be a vital that's the number one Reason why people have trouble with the pistol squad. I'd say besides strength It's it's ankle mobility hundred percent. It's because you're you're there's a lot more Angle flat excuse me ankle flexion with a pistol squat than a traditional squat Your knee is gonna travel much further forward and that's why that's why a pistol squat for me is almost impossible I have such bad such tight ankles in that particular position that and I'm strong enough I could definitely lift my body weight with one leg It's my ankle that gets in the way and that's most people. Yeah, I couldn't do it I couldn't do it until just recently till I actually addressed which that wasn't the goal The goal was related to a bilateral squat, right? I wanted to get into a deep Squat and work on my squat and scroll position, right? So but I couldn't do a pistol to that once I could actually once I had the ankle mobility The pistol squad was actually really easy. Yeah, cuz like you I had the leg strength You know, I had the leg strength to be able to do one-legged squats But I didn't have the ankle mobility to be able to do it. So that's probably I mean depending on who's asking this question But I'd say most of big limiting factor. Yes. Yeah, that's the issue Yeah And by the way again back to my point of like the mechanics matter If you do a pistol squat and your heel comes up off the ground like you're you're doing it wrong Like you do not want to you do not want the heel to rise And if it is rising then that's your issue is ankle mobility address that first really get good at that And then start with the regressions that we're talking about and work your way to it